22 EEPOET — 1889 



beginning to know sometliing. Our museums, when more complete and 

 better organised, will teach us much on this branch of the subject. They 

 ■will show us the infinite and wonderful and apparently capricious modifi- 

 cations of form, colour, and of texture to which every most minute portion 

 of the organisation of the innumerable creatures which people the earth 

 is subject. They will show us examples of marvellously complicated 

 and delicate arrangements of organs and tissues iu many of what we 

 consider as almost the lowest and most imperfectly organised groups of 

 beings with which we are acquainted. But as to the use of all these 

 structures and modifications in the economy of the creatures that possess 

 them, we know, I may almost say, nothing, and our museums will never 

 teach us these things. If time permitted I might give numerous examples 

 in the most familiar of all animals, whose habits and actions are matters 

 of daily observation, with whose life-history we are as well acquainted 

 almost as we are with our own, of structures the purposes of which are stili 

 most doubtful. There are many such even in the composition of our own 

 bodies. How, then, can we expect to answer such questions when they 

 relate to animals known to us only by dead specimens, or by the most 

 transient glimpses of the living in a state of nature, or when kept under 

 the most unnatural conditions in confinement ? And yet this is actually 

 the state of our knowledge of the vast majority of the myriads of living 

 beings which inhabit the earth. How can we, with our limited powers of 

 observation and limited capacity of imagination, venture to pronounce an 

 opinion as to the fitness or unfitness for its complex surroundings of 

 some peculiar modification of structure found in some strange animal 

 dredged up from the abysses of the ocean, or which passes its life in the dim 

 seclusion of some tropical forest, and into the essential conditions of 

 whose existence we have at present no possible means of putting our- 

 selves in any sort of relation ? 



How true it is that, as Sir John Lubbock says, ' we find in animals 

 complex organs of sense richly supplied with nerves, but the functions of 

 which we are as yet powerless to explain. There may be fifty other 

 senses as different from ours as sound is from sight ; and even within the 

 boundaries of our own senses there may be endless sounds which we can- 

 not hear, and colours as different as red from green of which we have no 

 conception. These and a thousand other questions remain for solution. 

 The familiar world which surrounds us may be a totally different place to 

 other animals. To them it may be full of music which we cannot hear, of 

 colour which we cannot see, of sensations which we cannot conceive.' 



The fact is that nearly all attempts to assign purposes to the varied 

 structures of animals are the merest guesses. The writers on natural 

 history of the early part of the present century, who 'for every why 

 must have a wherefore,' abound in these guesses, which wider know- 

 ledge shows to be untenable. Many of the arguments for or against 

 natural selection, based upon the assumed utility or equally assumed 



