DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 235 



their ancestor and the original tribe. In this case the sport 

 will be swamped by numbers, and after a few generations its 

 peculiarity will be obliterated. Or, we may suppose the offspring 

 of the sport faithfully to reproduce the advantageous peculiarity 

 undiminished. In this case the new variety will supplant the 

 old species ; but this theory implies a succession of phenomena, 

 so different from those of the ordinary variations which we see 

 daily, that it might be termed a theory of successive creations ; it 

 does not express the Darwinian theory, and is no more dependent 

 on the theory of natural selection than the universally admitted 

 fact that a new strong race, not intermarrying with an old 

 weak race, will surely supplant it. So much may be conceded. 



Lapse of Time. Darwin says with candour that he ' who 

 does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past 

 periods of time,' may at once close his volume, admitting there- 

 by that an indefinite, if not infinite, time is required by his 

 theory. Few will on this point be inclined to differ from the 

 ingenious author. We are fairly certain that a thousand years 

 has made no very great change in plants or animals living in 

 a state of nature. The mind cannot conceive a multiplier vast 

 enough to convert this trifling change by accumulation into 

 differences commensurate with those between a butterfly and 

 an elephant, or even between a horse and a hippopotamus. A 

 believer in Darwin can only say to himself, Some little change 

 does take place every thousand years ; these changes accumu- 

 late, and if there be no limit to the continuance of the process, 

 I must admit that in course of time any conceivable differences 

 may be produced. He cannot think that a thousandfold the 

 difference produced in a thousand years would suffice, accord- 

 ing to our present observation, to breed even a dog from a cat. 

 He may perhaps think that by careful selection, continued for 

 this million years, man might do quite as much as this ; but he 

 will readily admit that natural selection does take a much 

 longer time, and that a million years must by the true believer 

 be looked upon as a minute. Geology lends her aid to convince 

 him that countless ages have elapsed, each bearing countless 

 generations of beings, and each differing in its physical condi- 

 tions very little from the age we are personally acquainted 



