4 THE ORIGIN OF SrEClES BY NATURAL SELECTION. 



at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal 

 or even lesser numl)er.' He is, indeed, disposed to go fur- 

 ther than this, and to derive all organised beings whatsoever 

 from a single progenitor. Here, however, he judges from the 

 analogous structures and chemical composition of all plants 

 and animals, but admits that analogy may be an unsafe guide, 

 and so the number of the progenitors of the theory may be 

 reckoned at from eight to ten. 



But what, it may well be asked, are these progenitors or 

 prototypes? for these words are but generic terms, which con- 

 vey no notion of size, form, or quality. We must, in fact, 

 consider them as atoms or monads of unappreciable minute- 

 ness — not visible even by the solar microscoj)e; in truth, 

 nothing better than ' such stuiF as dreams are made of.' 



The theory supposes that from the hypothetic progenitors in 

 question — the origin of which it is as impossible for the human 

 mind to conceive as the origin of the universe itself — have 

 descended all living things, from the smallest infusorial animal- 

 cule up to the elephant, the whale, and man himself. These 

 mighty results are to be attained through the preservation of 

 ' favoured races in the struggle for life ;' that is, by a perpetual 

 sequence of profitable variations in every species of plants and 

 animals. The profitable variations, however, which the muta- 

 tions produce, are so slow, so minute, and so unappreciable 

 that the hypothesis demands millions of years for their accom- 

 plishment; an assumption which, as it is unsupported by any 

 fact, places it at once beyond the reach of human investiga- 

 tion, relegating it to the realm of imagination. 



Authentic history certainly affords no evidence in favour 

 of the theory of beneficial mutation by natural selection. The 

 wild and even the domestic animals of Egypt have undergone 

 no change in times of an antiquity which has been variously 

 estimated at from 5,000 up to 10,000 years. In the Egyptian 

 catacombs liave been found mummies of the ibis and the 

 kestrel hawk, not differing in a feather, or the spot of a feather, 

 from these birds of I'^gypt of the present day. The ox, the 



