et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 19 



tailed precisely with his own scheme of the 

 nature of things : being in truth that very 

 identical scheme in other clothes. 



But if, now, Darwin had really been, what 

 many believe him to have been, a profound 

 thinker, an intuitively scientific, systematic, 

 organising mind : had he been, as every true 

 thinker is, conscious of the enormous differ- 

 ence obtaining between a scientific hypothe- 

 sis founded on induction and a purely specu- 

 lative conjecture : the first thing he would 

 have done, in proposing to himself to account 

 for the origin of the parts of animals by 

 < Natural Selection, 5 by accumulated incre- 

 ment, would have been, to verify the power 

 of his agent. He would have asked himself: 

 Has my principle the power which I am 

 attributing to it ? Is it possible to account 

 for all the parts of animals by successively 

 accumulated increments ? Are there not parts 

 which could not possibly have originated in 



