442 NATURE AND MAN. 



animals in a warm cabin, but took place in a few hours when 

 they were put out into air whose temperature was considerably 

 below zero. 



Supposing, then, that we could trace out all the physical con- 

 ditions under which these adaptations come to be, we have still to 

 account for the adaptiveness in the constitution of the anitnals 

 which exhibit them. 



We find a singularly parallel case in that beautiful piece of 

 human workmanship, — a clock or chronometer so constructed, as, 

 by the accurate " compensation " of its pendulum or balance- 

 wheel, to keep accurate time under all ordinary variations of 

 climatic temperature. Surely we do not consider it a sufficient 

 account of its self-adjustment, to attribute it to the physical action 

 of heat or cold ; for this would disturb the performance of an 

 ordinary clock or watch. We seek the explanation of its special 

 "potentiality" in the compensating apparatus ; and we trace back 

 the origin of this apparatus to the mind of its contriver. So, as 

 it seems to me, however long may be the chain of " causation," or 

 the series of " unconditional sequences," that may be traceable 

 backwards in the ancestral history of any organized type, we come 

 to a beginning of it, as to the first term of an arithmetical or 

 geometrical progression ; and we have no less to account for the 

 common beginning of the whole Organized Creation, with its 

 unlimited possibilities of modification and adaptation, than if we 

 had to account for the separate production of each type of Plant 

 and Animal. 



I shall introduce one more curious illustration of my argument, 

 from a department of inquiry well worthy of systematic study, — 

 the influence of psychical conditions on the colour of animals. 

 The advocates of " natural selection " as an all-sufficient explana- 

 tion of the correspondence between the gorgeous hues of tropical 

 Birds and Insects, and the brilliant foliage and blossoms of the 

 trees in the midst of which they live, altogether neglect to tell us 

 how those varieties came to be engendered, the conformity of 

 whose colours to those of their environment made them the 

 "fittest" to survive. The story of Jacob and Laban shows the 

 antiquity of the belief that some influence exerted by the colour 

 of the "environment" on the visual sense of the parents, affects 



