DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 235 



difference to its descendants. What is this but stating that, 

 from time to time, a new species is created ? It does not, indeed, 

 imply that the new specimen suddenly appears in full vigour, 

 made out of nothing ; but it offers no explanation of the cause 

 of the divergence from the progenitors, and still less of the 

 mysterious faculty by which the divergence is transmitted 

 unimpaired to countless descendants. It is clear that every 

 divergence is not thus transmitted, for otherwise one and the 

 same animal might have to be big to suit its father and little to 

 suit its mother, might require a long nose in virtue of its grand- 

 father and a short one in virtue of its grandmother, in a word, 

 would have to resume in itself the countless contradictory 

 peculiarities of its ancestors, all in full bloom, and unmodified 

 one by the other, which seems as impossible as at one time to 

 be and not to be. The appearance of a new specimen capable 

 of perpetuating its peculiarity is precisely what might be termed 

 a creation, the word being used to express our ignorance of how 

 the thing happened. The substitution of the new specimens, 

 descendants from the old species, would then be simply an 

 example of a strong race supplanting a weak one, by a process 

 known long before the term 'natural selection' was invented. 

 Perhaps this is the way in which new species are introduced, 

 but it does not express the Darwinian theory of the gradual 

 accumulation of infinitely minute differences of every-day oc- 

 currence, and apparently fortuitous in their character. 



Another argument against the efficiency of natural selection 

 is, that animals possess many peculiarities the special advantage 

 of which it is almost impossible to conceive ; such, for instance, 

 as the colour of plumage never displayed ; and the argument 

 may be extended by pointing how impossible it is to conceive 

 that the wonderful minutiae of, say a peacock's tail, with every 

 little frond of every feather differently barred, could have been 

 elaborated by the minute and careful inspection of rival gallants 

 or admiring wives; but although arguments of this kind are 

 probably correct, they admit of less absolute demonstration than 

 the points already put. A true believer can always reply, ' You 

 do not know how closely Mrs. Peahen inspects her husband's 

 toilet, or you cannot be absolutely certain that under some 

 unknown circumstances that insignificant feather was really 



