DARWINISM: 7 



of this principle. To the uneducated eye, individual 

 differences may be totally unapparent, which are yet 

 perfectly conspicuous to the trainer, the huntsman, the 

 shepherd, and the drover. Wild creatures know their 

 mates ; wild herds select their leaders ; the bee and the 

 ant are capable of distinguishing the various individuals 

 of their own communities, for strangers of the very self- 

 same species with themselves they repel or destroy 1 . 

 As each creature is, in numberless cases, the offspring 

 of two unlike parents, it cannot be an exact copy of 

 either, and the influences of the two parents may be 

 combined in various proportions in each of the offspring; 

 but the parents themselves are continually changing, 

 with the variations of age and food and climate, so that 

 the very rule of resemblance between the producers and 

 the produced will entail another rule of unlikeness 

 between the several members of an offspring not born 

 all at once. 



It is a fact, which cannot be denied, that in number- 

 less instances the young of a creature differ more or 

 less from the parents and likewise among themselves. 

 Why it should be so has been in part explained. This 

 is the Variability, without which Natural Selection could 



i/ ' 



never have been thought of, because without differences 

 there would have been nothing to select. But this 

 Variability being granted, the Darwinian theory be- 

 comes possible becomes quite capable of referring 

 back the elephant and the pig, for instance, to the 

 same ancestry. The difference between progenitors and 



1 Darwin, ' Animals and Plants under Domestication,' vol.ii.p. 251. 



