362 Darwin, and after Darwin. 
are playing into the hands of Darwin’s critics by 
indirectly countenancing the difficulty which we are 
now considering. For, if correlation of growth is 
unreasonably supposed to be the only possible cause 
of the origin of incipient structures which are not use- 
ful from the first moment of their inception, clearly 
the field is greatly narrowed as regards the occurrence 
of incipient characters sufficient in amount—and, still 
more, in constancy of appearance and persistency of 
transmission—-to admit of furnishing material for the 
working of natural selection. But in the measure that 
incipient characters—whether varictal or specific— 
are recognised as not always or “necessarily” useful 
from the moment of their inception, and yet capable of 
being developed to a certain extent by the causes 
which first led to their occurrence, in that measure is 
this line of criticism closed. For of all the variations 
which thus occur, it is only those which afterwards 
prove of any use that are laid hold upon and wrought 
up by natural selection into adaptive structures, or 
working organs. And, therefore, what we see in 
organic nature is the net outcome of the development 
of all the happy chances. So it comes that the 
appearance presented by organic nature as a whole is 
that of a continual fulfilment of structural prophecies, 
when, in point of fact, if we had a similar record of all 
the other variations, it would be seen that possibly 
not one such prophecy in a thousand is ever destined 
to be fulfilled. 
Here, then, I feel justified in finally taking leave of 
the difficulty from the uselessness of incipient organs, 
as this difficulty has been presented, in varying degrees 
