NATURAL SELECTION 63 



hypotheses from which great truths concerning the 

 operations of Nature are brought to the light of day. 

 Was the concatenation of hypotheses, known as the 

 Darwinian theory of Evolution, founded upon such 

 a material basis of facts and phenomena, whether 

 gathered by Darwin himself or by his predecessors in 

 the field of scientific inquiry ? Were they, in truth, 

 legitimate hypotheses ? To this question there is but 

 one answer. Darwin elaborated his theory by a series 

 of pure guesses, none of them attachable to the known 

 phenomena of Nature. 



The Nature and the laws of Nature which we meet 

 with in the Origin of Species are not those which we 

 find outside of it. The nearest that Darwin ever 

 came to finding a phenomenal basis for any of his 

 hypotheses was in his doctrine of the Struggle for 

 Existence, which I have nevertheless proved to be 

 in direct contradiction to all the results of observa- 

 tion and experience. 



But the individual variation, round which his whole 

 evolutionary theory revolves, is a pure creature of his 

 imagination, differing in its behaviour from all in- 

 dividual variations that experience makes us acquainted 

 with, possessed of principles of action that contravene 

 the laws of Nature to which all other individual 

 variations are subject, an irresponsible entity, having 

 no law or principle of action except the work which 

 it pleases its author to assign to it. 



It is my purpose in this chapter to demonstrate 

 that individual variations, under the laws of heredity, 



