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FACTS AND FANCIES. 



The chance interaction of organisms and their 

 environment, even if we assume the organisms 

 and environment as given o us, could never 

 produce an orderly continuous progress of the 

 utmost complexity in its detail, and extending 

 through an enormous lapse of time. It has 

 been well said that if a pair of dice were to 

 turn up aces a hundred times in succession, 

 any reasonable spectator would conclude that 

 they were loaded dice ; so if countless millions 

 of atoms and thousands of species, each in- 

 cluding within itself most complex arrange- 

 ment of parts, turn up in geological time in 

 perfectly regular order and a continued grada- 

 tion of progress, something more than chance 

 must be implied. It is to be observed here 

 that every species of animal or plant, of how- 

 ever low grade, consists of many co-ordinated 

 parts in a condition of the nicest equilibrium. 

 Any change occurring which produces unequal 

 or disproportionate development, as the ex- 

 perience of breeders of abnormal varieties of 

 animals and plants abundantly proves, imperils 

 the continued existence of the species. Changes 

 must, therefore, in order to be profitable, affect 

 the parts of the organism simultaneously and 

 symmetrically. The chances of this may well 



