THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 475 
are most competent. To use a familar proverb, the weak- 
est goes to the wall. But the triumphant fraction again 
breeds to over-production, transmitting the qualities which 
secured its maintenance, but transmitting them indifferent 
degrees. The struggle for food again supervenes, and those 
to whom the favorable quality has been transmitted in 
excess, will triumph as before. 
It is easy to see that we have here the addition of incre- 
ments favorable to the individual, still more rigorously 
carried out than in the case of domestication; for not only 
are unfavorable specimens not selected by nature, but they 
are destroyed. This is what Mr. Darwin calls "Natural 
Selection," which acts by the preservation and accumula- 
tion of small inherited modifications, each profitable to the 
preserved being. With this idea he interpenetrates and 
leavens the vast store of facts that he and others have col- 
lected. We cannot, without shutting our eyes through 
fear or prejudice, fail to see that Darwin is here dealing, 
not with imaginary, but with true causes; nor can we fail 
to discern what vast modifications may be produced by 
natural selection in periods sufficiently long. Each indi- 
vidual increment may resemble what mathematicians call a 
" differential " (a quantity indefinitely small); but definite 
and great changes may obviously be produced by the inte- 
gration of these infinitesimal quantities, through practically 
infinite time. 
If Darwin, like Bruno, rejects the notion of creative 
power, acting after human fashion, it certainly is not be- 
cause he is unacquainted with the numberless exquisite 
adaptations on which this notion of a supernatural Artificer 
has been founded. His book is a repository of the most 
startling facts of this description. Take the marvelous 
observation which he cites from Dr. Kriiger, where a bucket, 
with an aperture serving as a spout, is formed in an orchid. 
Bees visit the flower: in eager search of material for their 
combs, they push each other into the bucket, the drenched 
ones escaping from their involuntary bath by the spout. 
Here they rub their backs against the viscid stigma of the 
flower and obtain glue; then against the pollen-masses, 
which are thus stuck to the back of the bee and carried 
away. " When the bee, so provided, flies to another flower 
or to the same flower a second time, and is pushed by its 
comrades into the bucket, and then crawls out by the 
