124 Luck, or Cunning? 
done it, than we can understand how the amceba.makes its 
test, or the protoplasm cements two broken ends of a piece 
of bone. Ces choses se font mais ne s’expliquent pas. So 
some denizen of another planet looking at our earth through 
a telescope which showed him much, but still not quite 
‘enough, and seeing the St. Gothard tunnel plumb on end so 
that he could not see the holes of entry and exit, would 
think the trains there a kind of caterpillar which went 
through the mountain by a pure effort of the will—that 
enabled them in some mysterious way to disregard material 
obstacles and dispense with material means. We know, 
of course, that it is not so, and that exemption 
from the toil attendant on material obstacles has been 
compounded for, in the ordinary way, by the single pay- 
‘ment of a tunnel ; and so with the cementing of a bone, 
our biologists say that the protoplasm, which is alone 
living, cements it much as a man might mend a piece of 
broken china, but that it works by methods and processes 
which elude us, even as the holes of the St. Gothard tunnel 
may be supposed to elude a denizen of another world. 
The reader will already have seen that the toils are 
beginning to close round those who, while professing to be 
guided by common sense, still parley with even the most 
superficial probers beneath the surface ; this, however, will 
appear more clearly in the following chapter. It will also 
appear how far-reaching were the consequences of the 
denial of design that was involved in Mr. Darwin’s theory 
that luck is the main element in survival, and how largely 
this theory is responsible for the fatuous developments in 
connection alike with protoplasm and automatism which 
a few years ago seemed about to carry everything before 
them. 
