Ill CRITICISMS ON " THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES " 85 



well enough to enable the organism to hold its 

 own against such competitors as it has met with, 

 but admits the possibility of indefinite improve- 

 ment. 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. Teleology tells us that they do so because 

 they were expressly constructed for so doing that 

 they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect 

 and so delicately adjusted that no one of their or- 

 gans 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 multitudinous variations of the Feline stock, 

 many of which died out from 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. 



Far from imagining that cats exist in order to 

 catch mice well, Darwinism supposes that cats exist 

 'because they catch mice well mousing being not 

 the end, but the condition, of their existence. And 

 if the cat type has long persisted as we know it, 

 the interpretation of the fact upon Darwinian 

 principles would be, not that the cats have re- 

 mained invariable, but that such varieties as have 

 incessantly occurred have been, on the whole, less 



