NoTE A TO PAGE 257. 
The passages in Dr. Whewell’s writings, to which allusion is 
here made, are somewhat too long to be quoted in the text. But 
as I think they deserved to be given, I will here reprint a letter 
which I wrote to ature in March, 1888. 
In his essay on the Reception of the Origin of Species, Prof. Huxley 
writes :— 
“It is interesting to observe that the possibility of a fifth alterna- 
tive, in addition to the four he has stated, has not dawned upon Dr. 
Whewell’s mind” (Life and Lectures of Charles Darwin, vol. ii, p. 
195). 
And again, in the article Science, supplied to The Reign of Queen 
Victoria, he says :— 
“Whewell had not the slightest suspicion of Darwin’s main theorem, 
even as a logical possibility’ (p 365). 
Now, although it is true that no indication of such a logical 
possibility is to be met with in ‘the Astory of the Inductive Sciences, 
there are several passages in the Bridgewater Treatise which show a 
glimmering idea of such a possibility. Of these the following are, 
perhaps, worth quoting Speaking of the adaptation of the period of 
flowering to the length of a year, he says :— 
“Now such an adjustment must surely be accepted as a proof of 
design, exercised in the formation of the world. Why should the 
solar year be so long and no longer? or, this being such a length, 
why should the vegetable cycle be exactly of the same length? Can 
this be chance?.... And, if not by chance, how otherwise could 
such a coincidence occur than by an intentional adjustment of these 
two things to one another; by a selection of such an organization in 
plants as would fit them to the earth on which they were to grow ; 
by an adaptation of construction to conditions; of the scale of con- 
struction to the scale of conditions? It cannot be accepted as an 
explanation of this fact in the economy of plants, that it is necessary 
to their existence; that no plants could possibly have subsisted, 
