132 Permanence and Evolution. 



find cannot well be imagined ; and this unlikeness 

 makes pure Darwinism, to say the least, ex- 

 tremely implausible, and as a certain plausibility 

 is the only ground for attaching importance to 

 the evolution hypothesis in any form, this is suffi- 

 cient for the condemnation of the theory of natural 

 selection pure and simple, which, possessing a 

 kind of apparent likelihood, as long as we keep 

 in the regions of the purely vague, as the evo- 

 lution of mammals from reptiles, yet is seen to 

 break down utterly when we attempt to apply it 

 to such more concrete problems, as the develop- 

 ment of the horse, ass, and zebra from one 

 common origin. On any other form of evo- 

 lutionism these particular remarks have, of 

 course, no bearing whatever. 



Also it may be asked with truth : Darwinism 

 rests on the supposition that all the characters 

 of an organised being are acquired by natural 

 selection, or are correlated with attributes so 

 acquired ; but these correlations, whence do they 



