el Darwin, and after Darwin. 
it was little less than puerile in him to see no more 
in the theory of natural selection than such a mere 
fisure of speech. To say that the liver selects the 
elements of bile, or that nature selects specific types, 
may both be equally unmeaning re-statements of facts ; 
but when it is explained that the term natural selec- 
tion, unlike that of “hepatic sensation,” is used as 
a shorthand expression for a whole group of well- 
known natural causes—struggle, variation, survival, 
heredity,_-then it becomes evidence of an almost 
childish want of thought to affirm that the expression 
is figurative and nothing more. The docirine of 
natural selection may be a huge mistake ; but, if so, 
this is not because it consists of any unmeaning 
metaphor: it can only be because the combination of 
natural canses which it suggests is not of the same 
adequacy in fact as it is taken to be in theory. 
Owen further objected that the struggle for existence 
could only act as a cause of the extinction of species, 
not of their origination—a view of the case which again 
shows on his part a complete failure to grasp the 
conception of Darwinism. Acting alone, the struggle 
for existence could only cause extermination ; but 
acting together with variation, survival, and heredity, 
it may very well—for anything that Owen, or others 
who followed in this line of criticism, show to the 
contrary—have produced every species of plant and 
animal that has ever appeared upon the face of the 
earth, 
Another and closely allied objection is, that the 
theory of natural selection “ personifies an abstrac- 
tion.” Or, as the Duke of Argyll states it, the theory 
is “essentially the image of mechanical necessity 
