ADAPTATION AND SELECTION IN NATURE. 117 



the direct effect of environments, by variation, struggle for 

 existence, heredity and selection between more or less 

 adapted individuals, by geographical isolation, by self- 

 adaptation to environments through protoplasmic response — 

 whether each or all of these be admitted into om- groping 

 views of a tangled problem, they are but biological questions 

 with a philosophical bearing, and must be settled by the 

 evidence that is forthcoming. The greatest injury to truth 

 may be done by haste in formulating cosmic theories too 

 ambitious for the available evidence, which aim at embracing 

 all Nature by a "law" which man has to conceive for 

 himself, and which his successors may entirely contradict. 



Surely it is Purpose here, there, and everywhere, which 

 furnishes the missing link in all the problems of science. 



If it did happen, indeed, in the Azoic Age of this world 

 that such a conjunction of chemical and physical conditions as 

 Professor Karl Pearson supposes took place, and eventuated in 

 the origin of life, if some remarkable environmental stimulus 

 was followed by a branching out into vegetable and animal 

 forms from the very undifferentiated masses of protoplasm 

 which then constituted the population of the globe, if from 

 that homogeneous mass of living forms there came by 

 further environmental changes such a marvellous complex 

 of life as a Foramiuifer presents, and in due time the 

 diverging and multiplying groups of organisms by Selection 

 or other factors of organic evolution till metazoa appeared, 

 and so the great drama of higher organic life was put on 

 the stage of a changing world, till at last the human bodv 

 and mind emerged from the great mammahan stock, and 

 this mind of man after long ages of groping among the 

 grosser rudiments of human life, began to read backward 

 by the light of science its remarkable past — if all this took 

 place Avithout any " Special Creation," " Creation by fiats," 

 "Creation by fabrication," or any other form of creation 

 which opponents may label with a needless adjective, found 

 neither in Revelation nor reason — if all this did happen in 

 the course of geological history, the mere inconceivable 

 length of time and apparent simpHcity {on paper) of the 

 processes can never block out the light of Purpose which 

 is seen after the event in every act of this fateful drama, 

 even though many shadows of ignorance throw up more 

 vividly the light we do see. 



At each stage of the story a being endowed with a full 

 measure of the knowledge of \\\q twentieth century, who 



