NATURAL SELECTION 81 



living organisms are built up of the same material, 

 protoplasm and the protoplasmic cell ; and also when, 

 by the study of comparative physiology and embry- 

 ology, it revealed the fact that the higher vertebrates 

 were once fish forms disporting in the waters formed 

 by the condensation of the vapours of the slowly 

 cooling earth. 



With the light that has been gained from various 

 fields of research, it is impossible to refuse accepting 

 the doctrine of evolution, and, as sufficiently demon- 

 strated, the fact that all the higher forms of life have 

 been evolved from lower forms. But though con- 

 strained to accept the evolutional principle as ex- 

 planatory of the origin of species, I do not feel myself 

 brought one whit nearer to the acceptance of Darwin's 

 doctrine, which professes to describe the modus 

 operandi of Nature in her work of development. 



The laws governing inheritance are for the most 

 part, according to Darwin, unknown. Thus we cannot 

 tell by what process carried on in Nature's laboratory 

 every single egg in a nest is differently specked or 

 mottled from all the others, or how it comes to pass 

 that each animal belonging to the same litter has its 

 own particular traits differentiated from those of the 

 rest of the litter, or how we find in the same family 

 one member taking more after the father, another 

 more after the mother, while a third seems to inherit 

 in a very small degree from either. In this respect 

 the law of inheritance is beyond all human calculation ; 

 but it is not a matter to cause surprise that it should 

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