AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 53 



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 con- 

 ditions 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 possible 

 to think of a whole infinitude of those fitful and fortuitous air- 

 tremblings, which we call sound, without indentation into any- 

 thing whatever of such an organ. 



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

 natural contingency in regard to the vicissitudes of conditions, 

 has no title to be named selection. Naturalists have long known 

 and spoken of the "influence 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 

 signalise in animals is really the fortuitous contingency of brute 

 nature ; and it is altogether fallacious to call such process, or 

 such non-process, by a term involving foresight and a purpose. 

 We have here, indeed, only a metaphor wholly misapplied. 

 The German writer who, many years ago, said " even the 

 genera are wholly a prey to the changes of the external univer- 

 sal life," saw precisely what Mr Darwin sees, but it never struck 

 him to style contingency selection. Yet, how dangerous, how 

 infectious, has not this ungrounded metaphor proved ! It has 

 become a principle, a law, and been transferred by very genuine 

 men into their own sciences of philology, physiology, and what 

 not. People will wonder at all this by-and-by. But to point 

 out the inapplicability of such a word to the processes of nature 

 referred to by Mr Darwin, is to point out also the impossibility 

 of any such contingencies proceeding, by graduated rise, from 

 stage to stage, into the great symmetrical organic system the 

 vast plan the grand harmonious whole by which we are sur- 

 rounded. This rise, this system, is really the objective idea ; 

 but it is utterly incapable of being accounted for by any such 

 agency as natural contingency in geological, or infinite, or any 

 time. And it is this which the word selection tends to conceal. 



We may say, lastly, in objection, here, that, in the fact of 

 "reversion" or "atavism," Mr Darwin acknowledges his own 

 failure. We thus see that the species as species is something 

 independent, and holds its own insita vis naturae within itself, 



