DARWIN AND HIS REVIEWERS. 157 



the improvement of mankind ; yet the race may be 

 designed to improve, and may be actually improving. 

 Or, to avoid the complication with free agency the 

 whole animate life of a country depends absolutely 

 upon the vegetation, the vegetation upon the rain. 

 The moisture is furnished by the ocean, is raised by 

 the sun's heat from the ocean's surface, and is wafted 

 inland by the winds. But what multitudes of rain- 

 drops fall back into the ocean are as much without a 

 final cause as the incipient varieties which come to 

 nothing! Does it therefore follow that the rains 

 which are bestowed upon the soil with such rule and 

 average regularity were not designed to support vege- 

 table and animal life? Consider, likewise, the vast 

 proportion of seeds and pollen, of ova and young a 

 thousand or more to one which come to nothing, 

 and are therefore purposeless in the same sense, and 

 only in the same sense, as are Darwin's unimproved 

 and unused slight variations. The world is full of 

 such cases ; and these must answer the argument for 

 we cannot, except by thus showing that it proves too 

 much. 



Finally, it is worth noticing that, though natural 

 selection is scientifically explicable, variation is not. 

 Thus far the cause of variation, or the reason why the 

 offspring is sometimes unlike the parents, is just as 

 mysterious as the reason why it is generally like the 

 parents. It is now as inexplicable as any other origi- 

 nation ; and, if ever explained, the explanation will 

 only carry up the sequence of secondary causes one step 

 farther, and bring us in face of a somewhat different 

 problem, but which will have the same element of 



