262 LIFE AND HABIT. 



small in their commencement and at each successive 

 stage as Mr. Darwin seems to believe. God — to use 

 the language of the Bible — is not extreme to mark 

 what is done amiss, whether with plant or beast or 

 man ; on the other hand, when towers of Siloam fall, 

 they fall on the just as well as the unjust. 



One feels, on considering Mr. Darwin's position, that 

 if it be admitted that there is in the lowest creature a 

 power to vary, no matter how small, one has got in this 

 power as near the " origin of species " as one can ever 

 hope to get. For no one professes to account for the 

 origin of life ; but if a creature with a power to vary 

 reproduces itself at all, it must reproduce another crea- 

 ture which shall also have tlie power to vary ; so that, 

 given time and space enough, there is no knowing where 

 such a creature could or would stop. 



If the primordial cell had been only capable of repro- 

 ducing itself once, there would have followed a single 

 line of descendants, the chain of which might at any 

 moment have been broken by casualty. Doubtless the 

 millionth repetition would have differed very mate- 

 rially from the original— as widely, perhaps, as we 

 differ from the primordial cell ; but it would only have 

 differed by addition, and could no more in any genera- 

 tion resume its latest development without having 

 passed through the initial stage of being what its first 

 forefather was, and doing what its first forefather did, 

 and without going through all or a sufficient number of 

 the steps whereby it had reached its latest differentia- 

 tion, than water can rise above its own level. 



The very idea, then, of reproduction involves, unles 



