232 THE THEOKY OF EVOLUTION 



view of the world a theistical conclusion/ l In a like 

 hostile fashion write also Pauly and France. 



How, however, without a theistical assumption we 

 can understand the origin of life, the origin of animals 

 and plants, the graduations within the two kingdoms, 

 the faculties for adaptation of the organisms, the 

 tendency to people the air, earth, and water, etc., 

 without intervention of a super-mundane cause, Wagner 

 certainly does not show us. 



If we know of the organisms that they can maintain 

 themselves in construction and function in agreement 

 with altered conditions of life, that is nothing more 

 than a statement of the fact but no explanation of it. 

 If we read that animals and plants occupy the air, the 

 water, and the dry land, and arrange themselves accord- 

 ingly, that also if it be true is again only a simple 

 statement. Or have air, water, and land the tendency 

 in themselves to become inhabited ? 



Let us, however, go into details and ask, for instance, 

 how it comes about that the lark rises singing into the 

 air, many flat fish lie on their sides, some plants become 

 carnivorous, why the plant Duvaua dependens produces 

 for the moth, Cecidosis eremita, a gall with a circular 

 cover which renews itself on the inner side and is 

 precisely large enough to let the moth escape, etc. If 

 it be assumed that all this was not always so but has 



i UmUldung der Tierwelt, p. 79. When Wagner speaks of scholastic 

 philosophers one would think that he had to do with a host of highly 

 primitively organized thinkers who had not at all attained to a proper 

 ' intellectual organ.' Just as well might Wagner term ' scholastics ' 

 all who oppose criticism. 



