4:10 METAPHYSICAL EVOLUTION. 



ment by natural selection, and that for three reasons. First, 

 there are innumerable adaptations — I cite only those known as 

 mimetic coloration — which appear to be only explicable by nat- 

 ural selection and not by use. Second, plants which are, in their 

 way, as well adapted to their environment as animals, are of 

 course incapable of activity. Thirdly, we need the doctrine of 

 natural selection to explain the origin of the capacity for exercise 

 itself. Unless we admit that which it is impossible to do from a 

 scientific stand-point, that designed structures have a mechanical 

 origin, it is necessary to conclude that in the struggle for exist- 

 ence the victory has been secured by those living beings who in 

 exercising their natural functions have increased by chance {'par 

 Jiasard ') their capacity for these functions more than others, and 

 that the beings thus favored have transmitted their fortunate gifts 

 to be still further developed by their descendants." 



To take up first the second and third of these propositions, 

 Prof. Raymond does not for the moment remember that move- 

 ment (or use) is an attribute of all life in its simplest forms, and 

 that the sessile types of life, both vegetable and animal, must, in 

 view of the facts, be regarded as a condition of degeneration. It 

 is scarcely to be doubted that the primordial types of vegetation 

 were all free swimmers, and that their habit of building cellulose 

 and starch is responsible for their early-assumed stationary condi- 

 tion. Their protoplasm is still in motion in the limited confines 

 of their walls of cellulose. The movements of primitive plants 

 have doubtless modified their structure to the extent of their dura- 

 tion and scope, and probably laid slightly varied foundations, on 

 which automatic nutrition has built widely diverse results. We 

 may attribute the origin of the forms of the vegetable kingdom 

 to three kinds of motion which have acted in conjunction with 

 the physical environment ; first, their primordial free movements ; 

 second, the intracellular movements of protoplasm ; third, the 

 movements of insects, which have doubtless modified the structure 

 of the floral organs. Of the forms thus produced, the fit have sur- 

 vived and the unfit have been lost, and that is what natural selec- 

 tion has had to do with it. 



The origin of mimetic coloration, like many other things, is yet 

 unknown. An orthodox Darwinian attributes it to ''natural selec- 

 tion," which turns out, on analysis, to be '' hasard." The survival 

 of useful coloration is no doubt the result of natural selection. 

 But this can not be confounded with the question of origin. On 



