224 THE REIGN OF LAW. 



of these as to enable him to apply to them the 

 instruments of his analysis, or to trace in their 

 working any definite relations to Space, or Time, 

 or Number. 



Since, then, laws, in this most definite sense of 

 the word, have not been discovered in the existing 

 phenomena, or in the past history of Organic Life, 

 let us look a little closer at the ideas which these 

 phenomena have suggested to the mind of those 

 who have speculated on the Origin and Develop- 

 ment of Species. 



There is one idea which has been common to 

 all theories of Development, and that is the idea 

 that ordinary generation has somehow been pro- 

 ducing, from time to time, extraordinary effects 

 and that a new Species is, in fact, simply an un- 

 usual birth. It is worthy of observation, that the 

 earlier forms in which the theory of Development 

 appeared, did suggest something more nearly ap- 

 proaching to a Law of Creation than is contained 

 in the later form which that theory has assumed 

 in the hands of Mr Darwin. The essential idea 

 of the theory of Development, in its earlier forms, 

 was, that modifications of structure arose somehow 



