THE BELFAST^ ADDRESS. 477 
the humble-bee with its rude cells, through the Melipona 
with its more artistic cells, to the hive-bee with its astonish- 
ing architecture. The bees place themselves at equal 
distances apart upon the wax, sweep and excavate equal 
spheres round the selected points. The spheres intersect, 
and the planes of intersection are built up with thin 
laminae. Hexagonal cells are thus formed. This mode 
of treating such questions is, as I have said, representa- 
tive. The expositor habitually retires from the more 
perfect and complex, to the less perfect and simple, and 
carries you with him through stages of perfecting adds 
increment to increment of infinitesimal change, and in this 
way gradually breaks down your reluctance to admit that 
the exquisite climax of the whole could be a result of 
natural selection, 
Mr. Darwin shirks no difficulty; and, saturated as the sub- 
ject was with his own thought, he must have known, 
better than his critics, the weakness as well as the strength 
of his theory. This of course would be of little avail were 
his object a temporary dialectic victory, instead of the 
establishment of a truth which he means to be everlasting. 
But he tukes no pains to disguise the weakness he has dis- 
cerned; nay, he takes every pains to bring it into the 
strongest light. His vast resources enable him to cope with 
objections started by himself and others, so as to leave the 
final impression upon the reader's mind that, if they be not 
completely answered, they certainly are not fatal. Their 
negative force being thus destroyed, you are free to be 
influenced by the vast positive mass of evidence he is able 
to bring before you. This largeness of knowledge, and 
readiness of resource, render Mr. Darwin the most terrible 
of antagonists. Accomplished naturalists have leveled 
heavy and sustained criticisms against him not always 
with the view of fairlv weighing his theorv, but with the 
express intention of exposing its weak points only. This 
does not irritate him. He treats every objection with a 
soberness and thoroughness which even Bishop Butler 
might be proud to imitate, surrounding each fact with its 
appropriate detail, placing it in its proper relations, and 
usually giving it a significance which, as long as it was 
kept isolated, failed to appear. This is done without a 
trace of ill-temper. He moves over the subject with the 
passionless strength of a glacier; and the grinding of the 
