446 Darwin, and after Darwin. 
Now, it is surely obvious that such a “ hierarchy of ministrations” 
as this, far from telling against the theory of natural selection, is 
the very thing which tel’s most in its favour. The fact that 
animals, for instance, only appeared upon the earth after there 
were plants for them to feed upon, is clearly a necessity of the 
case, whether or not there was any design in the matter. Such 
“ ministrations,” therefore, as plant-organisms yield to animal- 
organisms is just the kind of ministration that the theory of 
natural selection requires. Thus far, then, both the theories— 
natural selection and super-natural design—have an equal right 
to appropriate the facts. But now, if in no one instance can 
it be shown that the ministration of plant-life to animal-life is 
of such a kind as to subserve the interests of animal-life without 
at the same time subserving those of the plant-life itself, then 
the fact makes wholly in favour of the naturalistic explanation 
of such ministration as appears. If any plants had presented 
any characters pointing prospectively to needs of animals without 
primarily ministering to their own, then, indeed, there would 
have been no room for the theory of natural selection. But as 
this can nowhere be alleged, the theory of natural selection finds 
all the facts to be exactly as it requires them to be: such minis- 
tration as plants yield to animals becomes so much evidence 
of natural selection having slowly formed the animals to appro- 
priate the nutrition which the plants had previously gathered— 
and gathered under the previous influence of natural selection 
acting on themselves entirely for their own sakes. Therefore 
I say it is painfully manifest that “the enchainment of all the 
various orders of creatures in a hierarchy of activities,” is 
not “in harmony with what we might expect to find in a 
worid the outcome of a First Cause possessed of intelligence 
and [beneficent] will.” So far as any argument from such “en- 
chainment” reaches, it makes entirely against the view which 
Mr. Mivart is advocating. In point of fact, there is a total 
absence of any such ‘“‘ ministration” by one “order of crea- 
tures” to the needs of any other order, as the beneficent design 
theory would necessarily expect; while such ministration as 
actually does obtain is exactly and universally the kind which 
the naturalistic theory requires. 
Again, quite independently, and still more recently, Mr. Mivart 
