The Origin of Organic Forms. 205 



breaks down unless it tell us how the competitors 

 have been reared and trained, and have been endowed 

 with the qualities and requirements that bring them 

 into competition. 



For at bottom the question is not the survival of 

 the fittest, but the origination, development, and con- 

 tinuance of any. How has any portion of matter came 

 to be a living thing ? How did the life of one indi- 

 vidual pass on into another ? How has the broad dif- f 

 ference between animal and vegetable been produced ?f 

 How did all the complex adaptations of organs and the 

 nice adjustments of organisms to environment arise ? 

 " Is there not a cause ? " Evolution must disclose it 

 or confess all vital problems are left unsolved. If 

 dynamic law covers the whole ground and elucidates 

 all the facts, let its applicability be exhibited with 

 reasonable explicitness. No such scientific precision 

 is attempted. When we ask for definite conceptions, 

 or look for explanations that will have something 

 approaching scien title exactness, we get vague general- 

 izations, far fetched analogies, an imposing array of ab- 

 stract principles, and are in the last resort conducted 

 into the eternal darkness of the unknowable. Evolu- 

 tion, as a rational theory of organic nature, is fatally 

 defective. The new cosmic philosophy is found want- 

 ing in its own chosen field. 



An illustration may make more evident the just- 

 ness of this criticism. The growth of a single germ 

 presents to the dynamic theory of organic evolutioa 



