EDITOR'S TABLE. 



411 



THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON 

 EVOLUTION. 



THE Duke of Argyll IB a writer 

 who finds it very hard to recon- 

 cile himself to the doctrine of evolu- 

 tion in the only form in which it can 

 ever prove satisfactory to the scien- 

 tific world. He believes in evolution, 

 or, as he prefers to call it, develop- 

 ment; but he wants to have it in 

 a shape to suit himself, with little 

 touches of special creation thrown 

 in here and there, to ease off the 

 difficult places and keep in touch 

 with older modes of thought. He 

 has lately returned to the subject in 

 an article in The Nineteenth Cen- 

 tury, some of the observations in 

 which seem to us deserving of atten- 

 tion. 



In the first place, we have the 

 complaint that " the very word ' de- 

 velopment' was captured by the 

 Darwinian school as if it belonged 

 to them alone, and the old familiar 

 idea was identified with theories with 

 which it had no connection what- 

 ever.'' The fact is that, if the Dar- 

 winian school captured the word de- 

 velopment, it was not so much the 

 result of a freebooting raid on their 

 part as of the complete abandon- 

 ment and rejection of the idea of 

 development, in all that related to 

 the origin of species, on the part of 

 that orthodox school to which the 

 duke gives so much sympathy. As 

 his Lordship remarks, the facts of 

 development had long been con- 

 spicuous in embryonic growth and 

 in the production of plants from 

 seeds; and yet when the idea was 

 broached that one species might 

 have been "developed" out of an- 

 other, or that the work of creation 

 could have proceeded otherwise than 



by a succession of special divine 

 fiats, the whole orthodox world was 

 up in arms. The " facts " of devel- 

 opment, in spite of the " familiarity " 

 on which the duke lays stress, had 

 really done nothing to modify popu- 

 lar conception on this subject; on 

 the contrary, opinion in the age just 

 preceding Darwin was less enlight- 

 ened by far than had been the views 

 of many early thinkers, including 

 that rigid doctrinarian St. Augus- 

 tine. The idea of development, as 

 applied to the origin of species, was, 

 we may therefore say, forced upon 

 an unwilling world by Darwin ; and 

 it is no wonder, consequently, if to 

 some extent the idea became iden- 

 tified in the public mind with the 

 Darwinian theory. 



"We can not agree with the duke 

 in his criticism of the term " natural 

 selection." The question is not how 

 the term has been understood by 

 careless or ignorant people, because 

 such will always make a bungle of 

 things, but whether it has concealed 

 any false implications for those who 

 have made a thoughtful use of it. 

 The duke says that "it resorted to 

 the old, old Lucretian expedient of 

 personifying Nature and lending the 

 glamour of that personification to 

 the agency of bare mechanical ne- 

 cessity and to the coincidences of 

 mere fortuity." We doubt whether, 

 in the minds of serious thinkers, 

 such a "glamour" ever attached to 

 the term. On the contrary, we are 

 persuaded that to such it suggested 

 nothing beyond a kind of automatic 

 movement in Nature by which the 

 adaptation of organisms to their cos- 

 mic surroundings became ever closer 

 and closer. His Lordship says that 

 Darwin was led to the phrase "by 



