Auckland Institute. 44S 



termed the Novum organon of biologists. It is true that the leading principles 

 of Darwinism, that clear and luminous law of constant variation in the 

 individual offspring of all creatures, and the survival of the fittest, have well 

 nigh passed out of the pale of discussion, and have become almost universally 

 received as an "established scientific truth.'"^" 



But the value and importance of this theory is that it is not a simple dis- 

 covery which once made has but to be accepted and registered in the records 

 of science, but that it is the enunciation of a principle — a law — the operations 

 of which have yet to be traced backwards into the remotest past, to the very 

 origins of life, and forward to possible developments of it, perhaps yet undreamt 

 of ; — a principle which has stirred to its depth every branch of science and 

 thought, which has given them a fresh impulse and new aims, and has elevated 

 what were before but collections of isolated facts into fertile elements of 

 inductive reasoning, and evidences of an universal sequence of cause and effect 

 leading continually onwards and upwards, from the humblest beginnings of 

 life, to a future of which no limits can be discerned. 



That such a theory should, in its larger developments, excite opposition 

 was not only natural but desirable. Discussion, the conflict of opposite 

 opinion, seems to be the sole means given to man for the certain discovery of 

 recondite truth ; and the fertility of a new principle may perhaps be measured 

 by the amount of opposition and controversy it meets with on its promulgation. 



But the chief objections taken to Darwinism are not to the theory in 

 itself or in its nearer or more familiar results, but rather to some of the larger 

 deductions which may be more or less hypothetically drawn from it — to some 

 of its special applications, as the descent of man — and especially to its 

 sufiiciency as the one law by which all the developments into which life has 

 branched can be accounted for. 



The views of the leading opponents, or rather modifiers of the theory, 

 remaining in the field in our own language, and I do not profess to go further, 

 are I imagine fairly represented. 



1. By the Duke of Argyll in his well known book " The Reign of Law." 



2. By Mr. St. George Mivart in '^ The Genesis of Species " ; and 



3. By Mr. Wallace, the co-discoverer of the law, and its most able and 

 successful supporter, but who has suggested some limitations to it with far 

 more effect, as it appears to me, than any of its avowed opponents. 



Now the positions of the Duke of Argyll, as I understand them, are : — 



1. He admits that the existing and past conditions of the world — that 



which we comprise in the idea of creation — have been brought about by the 



" use of means working to an end ; " by the operation of that uniform, 



orderly, and invariable sequence of phenomena which we call a law ; that this 



* "Reign of Law," p. 219. 



