80 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



not yet become so affected as, to prevent them from 

 breeding with the parent form and with one another. 

 But as further modification ensues from other changes 

 in external conditions, the reproductive system becomes 

 so altered as to prevent them breeding beyond their 

 own now fixed type. It is no wonder, therefore, 

 that much controversy has arisen among naturalists 

 as to whether certain forms are to be regarded as 

 specific or as merely varietal. 



When, in dealing with the origin of species, we 

 endeavour to look beyond the present phenomenal 

 world and recover the past, we find a thick oblivious 

 curtain drawn before our eyes, with a few rents and 

 chinks here and there, through which we see darkly, 

 and obtain a few obscured peeps into the laboratory of 

 Nature, and discover, far apart from each other, some 

 few traces of her footsteps in her evolutionary progress. 



Our knowledge of Nature's developmental action 

 and processes is as yet very amorphous ; and the 

 present conditions are exceedingly favourable to the 

 cosmos-theory builder. The scientific mind is anxious 

 to know, and is impatient of problems that baffle its 

 research. It has been, therefore (we may assume so 

 much), far too ready to accept as authoritative a creed 

 that professes to have torn the veil from Nature's 

 face, and by the aid of a systematised grouping of 

 assumptions, more or less plausible, to exhibit Nature's 

 creative power and energy at work. Modern scientific 

 research, however, made a most important and illumin- 

 ating discovery when it established the fact that all 



