I THE DARWINIAN HYPOTHESIS 13 



any reason to believe that there are any limits to 

 the amount of modification producible, or to ask 

 how long an animal is likely to endeavour to 

 gratify an impossible desire. The bird, in our 

 example, would surely have renounced fish dinners 

 long before it had produced the least effect on leg 

 or neck. 



Since Lamarck's time, almost all competent 

 naturalists have left speculations on the origin of 

 species to such dreamers as the author of the 

 " Vestiges," by whose well-intentioned efforts the 

 Lamarckian theory received its final condemnation 

 in the minds of all sound thinkers. Notwith- 

 standing this silence, however^the transmutation 

 theory, as it has been called, has beerTa " skeleton 

 in the closet" to many an honest zoologist and 

 botanist who had a soul above the mere naming of 

 dried plants and skins. ^'Surely, has such an one 

 thought, nature is a mighty and consistent whole, 

 and the providential order established in the 

 world of life must, if we could only see it rightly, 

 be consistent with that dominant over the multi- 

 form shapes of brute matter. But what is the 

 history of astronomy, of all the branches of physics, 

 of chemistry, of medicine, but a narration of the 

 steps by which the human mind has been com- 

 pelled, often sorely against its will, to recognise 

 the operation of secondary causes in events where 

 ignorance beheld an immediate intervention of a 

 higher power ? And when we know that living 



