164 THE FALLACIES OP NATURAL SELECTION. 



The question of the efficiency of Natural Selection 

 is wholly immaterial. There is little doubt that, if 

 this factor were not so " cabined, cribbed, and confined," 

 it would be fully equal to the task of evolving a 

 dragon from a mosquito. Natural Selection may be 

 so efficient, potentially, that its capacity, — where suffered 

 to display itself, — might be shown to be almost infinite. 

 But, when the efficiency of Natural Selection, in 

 accumulating variations, organs, or features, is circum- 

 scribed by the fact, that the variations, organs, or 

 features, possible to be so accumulated, are restricted, 

 in number and kind, to the number and kind previ- 

 ously lost by the respective, varying species ; all specu- 

 lation, as to what Natural Selection might or could do, 

 if only it had sufficient variations, organs, or features 

 to accumulate, will-advance the theory of development, 

 not a hair's breadth. 



Darwin fancies, that, in the fearful struggle for exist- 

 ence which he describes as being continually waged, 

 the possession of one of these slight variations, which 

 are assumed to " occur in the course of thousands of 

 generations," will give its owner such an advantage 

 over its competitors, as will ensure its being classed 

 with "the strongest and most vigorous," and as will 

 therefore occasion its survival, by which it will be 

 enabled to procreate its kind, and perpetuate the said 

 variation in its descendants. This process, of the 

 preservation of a varying individual, is assumed to 

 repeat itself again and again, at intervals of a thousand 

 generations or so; and the consequent aggregation of 

 such vaiiations is alleged to represent the assumed 



