1 8 DARWINISM. 



everything but taste ; there are purple-leaved varieties 

 of the beech and the hazel; and a great multitude of 

 plants sometimes exhibit their leaves cut, blotched, and 

 variegated 1 . 



Now, from the working of Nature under, as it were, 

 man's guidance, we pass to the working of Nature when 

 left to her own discretion. The work of Natural Selec- 

 tion is a very slow and secret work ; the slowness of it 

 veils the movement. As with the hour-hand of a tiny 

 watch travelling but an inch in a day, there is progress 

 which you cannot discern, there is change that can be 

 marked and registered at intervals, though each succes- 

 sive moment and each successive movement seem to 

 leave things exactly as they were. You have heard 

 of the Greek simpleton who had been told that a raven 

 lived three hundred years, and so bought one to see. 

 We might live three thousand years instead of three 

 hundred without being able to prove the theory of 

 Natural Selection by actual observing. But when a 

 group of most important observed facts can be explained 

 consistently by this theory, and by none other, while no 

 fact has been brought forward to make it inadmissible, 

 it ought to be accepted till some theory can be pro- 

 duced equally unimpeachable and explanatory of a larger 

 group of facts. 



Qualities are inherited ; but with this peculiarity, that 

 very generally, and sometimes of necessity, the inheritor 

 comes into possession of the inherited quality at the 

 same period of life at which it was acquired by the 



1 'Animals and Plants under Domestication,' vol. ii. pp. 348-351. 



