NATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY 255 



development, according to nature, from a germ-cell which was part 

 of the body of a preexisting organism, I do not see how they can 

 find anything but new reason for their opinion in the discovery 

 that men and dogs and elephants and whales have all inherited 

 their hearts from a common mammalian ancestor ; nor need the 

 proof furnished by the structure and development of the heart in 

 all air-breathing vertebrates, of still more remote descent from 

 ancestors that lived in the water and breathed by gills, fail to give 

 new strength to the opinion. 



Huxley, in 1864, says: "If we apprehend the spirit of the 

 ' Origin of Species ' rightly, nothing can be more opposed to tele- 

 ology as it is commonly understood than the Darwinian theory. 

 According to teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired 

 straight at a mark ; according to Darwin, organisms are like grape- 

 shot, of which one hits something and the rest fall wide. 



" For the teleologist an organism exists because it was made 

 for the conditions in which it is found ; for the Darwinian an 

 organism exists because, out of the many of its kind, it is the 

 only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which 

 it is found. Teleology implies that the organs of every organism 

 are perfect and cannot be improved ; the Darwinian theory simply 

 affirms that they work well enough to enable the organism to 

 hold its own against such competitors as it has met with, but 

 admits the possibility of indefinite improvement. But an example 

 may bring into clearer light the profound opposition between the 

 ordinary teleological and the Darwinian conception. 



"Cats catch mice, small birds, and the like, very well. Tele- 

 ology tells us that they do so because they were constructed for 

 so doing, — that they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect 

 and so delicately adjusted that no one of their organs could be 

 altered, without the change involving the alteration of all the rest. 

 Darwinism affirms, on the contrary, that there was no express con- 

 struction concerned in the matter; but that among the multitudi- 

 nous variations of the Feline stock, many of which died out for 

 want of power to resist opposing influences, some, the cats, were 

 better fitted to catch mice than others, whence they throve and 

 persisted, in proportion to the advantage over their fellows thus 

 offered to them. 



