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enough to account for the presently-existing varieties, 

 from one, or even several, primordial forms. So to 

 speak, it is not in geological time to account for the 

 transformation of the elephant into the stag from ac- 

 celeration, or for that of the stag into the elephant from 

 retardation, of movement. And we may speak sim- 

 ilarly of the growth of the neck of the giraffe, or even 

 of the elevation of the monkey into man. Moreover, 

 time apart, conditions have no such power in themselves. 

 It is impossible to conceive of animal or vegetable 

 effluvia ever creating the nerve by which they are felt, 

 and so gradually the Schneiderian membrane, nose, and 

 whole olfactory apparatus. Yet these effluvia are the 

 conditions of smell, and, ex hypothesi, ought to have 

 created it. Did light, or did the pulsations of the air, 

 ever by any length of time, indent into the sensitive 

 cell, eyes, and a pair of eyes ears, and a pair of ears ? 

 Light conceivably might shine for ever without such a 

 wonderfully complicated result as an eye. Similarly, 

 for delicacy and marvellous ingenuity of structure, the 

 ear is scarcely inferior to the eye ; and surely it is pos- 

 sible to think of a whole infinitude of those fitful and 

 fortuitous air-tremblings, which we call sound, without 

 indentation into anything whatever of such an organ. 



A third objection to Mr. Darwin's theory is, that the 

 play of natural contingency in regard to the vicissi- 

 tudes of conditions, has no title to be named selection. 

 Naturalists have long known and spoken of the " influ- 

 ence of accidental causes ; but Mr. Darwin was the 

 first to apply the term selection to the action of these, 

 and thus convert accident into design. The agency to 

 which Mr. Darwin attributes all the changes which he 

 would signalize in animals is really the fortuitous con.- 



