6 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY NATURAL SELECTIOX. 



into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, and a maggot 

 into a bee, arc wonderful mutations, but nothing in com- 

 parison with those which suppose eight or ten nameless atoms 

 to have peopled the land and the waters with all their 

 varied forms of life. To bear any resemblance to the trans- 

 formations of the Darwinian theory, the frog ought at least 

 to be transformed into a crocodile, the butterfly into a dove, 

 and the bee into a flilcon or eagle. 



The arguments in support of the theory of natural selec- 

 tion are, of course, chiefly derived from the varieties which 

 occasionally arise in plants and animals; and this part of his 

 subject Mr. Darwin has elaborated with the great skill and 

 ingenuity of a most accomplished naturalist, who has tra- 

 velled far and studied long. The objections which here 

 present themselves are obvious. Variation in the wild or 

 natural state of plants and animals is rare and evanescent, 

 and can in no case, as far as I know, be shown to result in 

 improvement, or what Mr. Darwin calls ' profitable variation.' 

 It is only in the cultivated state of plants and the domesticated 

 state of animals that variation is frequent; that is, after 

 plants and animals have been long subjected to the control 

 and direction of man. Even then it is but a small number 

 of both that undergoes variation at all. The variety wliich 

 takes place, therefore, under man's direction ought not to be 

 taken into account at all, because, if the theory be true, vari- 

 ation must have been rife for millions of years before man 

 existed, the geological record, the true history of these 

 countless ages, affording no evidence of it. 



But, even in plants and animals which undergo variety 

 under man's control, there is a vast difference in the degree 

 in which they do so, even when we are tolerably sure that the 

 wild sources are the same species. Thus, the variety which the 

 blue rock pigeon and the Indian jungle fowl undergo is end- 

 less, Avhile the ass, the two camels, hardly vary at aU. Even 

 when variety takes place it ought, as Mr. Darwin expresses 

 it, to be a profitable one to the individual; that is, be such 



