April 5, 1883 | 
NAT ORE 
527 
torture by akind of thumbscrew (#éanz/o), which is applied 
to her head. Asmall tree is partly divided along themiddle, 
the skull of the poor woman is inserted as if it were 
a wedge for splitting the tree still farther. Great pressure 
is exerted by forcing the halves of the tree together with 
the aid of pulleys” (i. 201). This of course has the 
wished-for effect, and as in the “ processus inquisitorii,’’ 
the wretched victims ‘dum propria sua confessione 
contra se pugnare coguntur sul ipsius proditores torte 
constituuntur.” : A. H. K. 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 
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Natural Selection and Natural Theology 
I READ with interest, in NATURE, vol. xxvii. p. 362, the reply 
made by Dr. Romanes to a letter of mine which, although not 
originally addressed to a scientific organ, found hospitable 
reception in your columns. It was not much out of place there, 
for it was essentially an inquiry whether certain inferences may 
or may not sczentzfically be drawn from certain premisses. I am 
not wholly without hope of making it clear that the criticisms 
which I ventured to bring forward are grounded in reason; and 
confining my rejoinder strictly to the issue joined, I may hope 
not to be long nor very tedious. Let me trust that no curtness of 
statement will imply any want of the great respect which I 
entertain for an able investigator and writer, whose view may be 
imperfectly apprehended, or may bear an interpretation I should 
accede to. 
The issue is a narrow one, and there is no need to widen it. 
Dr. Romanes is understood to derive from scientific premisses the 
conclusion that evidence of design is not legitimately derivable 
from the structure and adaptations of plants and animals, and, 
more particularly, that the theory of natural selection has de- 
stroyed the evidence of special design in organic nature, so that 
now the facts of organic nature furnish no other and no better 
evidence of design than do the facts of inorganic nature. 
The first of these conclusions was derived from the proposition 
that there is no point of logical contact between natural science 
and the idea of design, wherefore no inference can legitimately 
be carried from the facts of the one to the conceptions of the 
other. I suggested that the maintainer of that position could 
not consistently argue that a particular scientific theory has 
annihilated an inference admittedly beyond its logical range. 
The reply is that, ‘‘ If a man believes that there is no logical 
connection between one thing and another, I do not understand 
why he should be deemed inconsistent because he endeavours to 
show the fictitious character of the logical connection which has 
been erroneously supposed to exist.” But the point of the objec- 
tion was that, while insisting that any inference from the one to 
the other was invalid from the nature of the case, he actually 
inferred that certain scientific facts and theories completely over- 
throw and destroy the theory of particular design in organic 
nature. This may be. Only one would think that whatever 
may be legitimately overthrown may be as legitimately sup- 
ported. 
Moreover, if I rightly understand, there was not long agoa 
legitimate ground of inference (whether scientific in the narrower 
sense or philosophical need not here be inquired) from organic 
nature to design. ‘* For it would be proof positive of intelligent 
design if it could be shown that all species of plants and animals 
were created ” ; and therefore proof presumptive while the theory 
of special creation was accepted and probable. At least—and this 
is the point—the ‘argument from structure and adaptation to 
design was then admissible and even cogent. 
Now, from the scientific side, upon which we are standing, 
special creation means only that the forms were scientifically in- 
explicable, and to be taken as original; their adaptations to 
their surroundings and their relations of means to ends in them- 
selves equally as primary endowments. And whatever evidences 
of intellectual origination these manifested, were seen in the things 
themselves, and we suppose are to be seen there still, The 
inference was not one from an intellectual originator to design 
in the organic world, but from marks and operations in the 
latter which indicated design to an intellectual originator. The 
inference to most minds was convincing; at least it was legiti- 
mate. The recognised laws and operations of nature—a better 
knowledge of which has destroyed so many crude notions—were 
not thought to interfere with it. 
It used to be so, but we have changed all that. How? 
First, by the declaration of the principle that the facts of 
organic nature, in all their multiplicity and variety, yield no 
other and no better indications of design than do any of the 
facts of inorganic nature. That is to say, a stratum no more 
than a structure, a crystal than a chrysalis, living things and 
their responses than lifeless things simply acted upon, things 
which are intelligible only when contemplated as means and 
ends, no more than things of which ends are predicable, if at all, 
only by remote implication. Not only is the one as good as the 
other, but any one is said to be as good as all. Because of ‘‘ the 
universal prevalence of laws and sequences of cause and effect, 
. .. they are not really or logically strengthened by a mere 
enumeration of particular instances. . . . The so-called law of 
causation as a whole being known, and its universality recog- 
nised, its true argumentative value to the theory of theism is not 
influenced by the explicit formulation of any number of its 
specific cases.” 
Here ‘‘law of causation,” or the way how something comes 
to pass, is mixed up with ‘‘ evidence of design,” or what it was 
for, And we are to conclude that the immense variety and 
multiplicity of adaptations of particular means which accomplish 
particular ends in organic nature bring no contributory and 
cumulative evidence as to there being any design in them. In 
palliation of the charge of ‘‘damnable iteration,” to which the 
teleologists are thus exposed, it may be pleaded that, although 
possibly one good witness or one good observation may be as 
convincing as many for certifying a fact, surely the more and the 
more varied the better for proving an underlying intervention— 
of which the evidence must always be circumstantial, and the 
conclusion a judgment or belief. 
The old belief that adaptation of means to ends in plants and 
animals gives evidence of intellectual origination, had not been 
seriously unsettled by the scientific belief of the universality of 
the law of causation. It remains to be seen whether it will 
survive the establishment of the belief that the forms in which 
these adaptations are recognised have themselves been slowly 
evolved and diversified ina way that is partly explained by the 
doctrine of natural selection; and this is the gist of the 
question. 
Dr. Romanes thinks that we have, in natural selection, ‘‘a 
cause other than intelligence competent to produce the adapta- 
tions,” one which supersedes intelligence by working gradually. 
For, ‘‘if the adaptations have been effected gradually, and by 
the successive elimination of the more favourable variations by a 
process of natural causation, we clearly have a totally different 
case to contemplate, and one which is destitute of any evidence 
of special design.” ‘‘ The progressive adaptations of structures 
to functions by such a purely physical cause as natural selection, 
when once clearly revealed, must destroy all special or particular 
evidence of design, even supposing such design to exist.” This 
phrase, ‘‘such a purely physical cause as natural selection,” and 
the preceding phrase italicised by its author as specially signifi- 
cant and as being its equivalent, show that the term is used in its 
strict sense. So the substitute for intelligence, that which is 
said to account for all the adaptations in living nature, is the 
successive destruction of the less favourable variations by natural 
causes, leaving the most favourable to survive! Here ‘‘ we 
clearly have a totally different case to contemplate, and one 
which is destitute of any evidence of special design,”—equally 
destitute, one would say, of any pretensions to act as its substi- 
tute until it is explained how the physical destruction of a part 
should have set the rest into varying at all, into varying advan- 
tageously, and into varying into the very special ways they have 
done. Not till this, or something like it, is done, can natural 
selection pure and simple claim to give scientific explanation of 
the adaptations and the forms at whose birth it has assisted. 
When I before insisted that ‘‘to make the purely physical 
explanation tenable it must be shown that natural selection 
scientifically accounts for the adaptation,” and that it has not 
done this, that no reasons have been given why the organisms 
