﻿Characters as Adaptive and Specific. 277 



plants, wheat, cabbage, maize, &c, as well as all 

 the hosts of climatic varieties, both of animals and 

 plants, in a state of nature. Indeed, on taking a 

 wide survey of the facts, we do not find that the 

 principle of utility is any better able to confer 

 stability of character than are many other principles, 

 both known and unknown. Nay, it is positively less 

 able to do so than are some of these other principles. 

 Darwin gives two very probable reasons for this 

 fact ; but I need not quote them a second time. It 

 is enough to have seen that this argument from 

 stability or constancy is no less worthless than the 

 previous one. Yet these are the only two arguments 

 of a corroborative kind which Mr. Wallace adduces 

 whereby to sustain his " necessary deduction." 



6. At this point, therefore, it may well seem that 

 we need not have troubled ourselves any further 

 with a generalization which does not appear to have 

 anything to support it. And to this view of the 

 case I should myself agree, were it not that many 

 naturalists now entertain the doctrine as an essential 

 article of their Darwinian creed. Hence, I proceeded 

 to adduce considerations per contra. 



Seeing that the doctrine in question can only rest 

 on the assumption that there is no cause other than 

 natural selection which is capable of originating any 

 single species — if not even so much as any single 

 specific character — I began by examining this assump- 

 tion. It was shown first that, on merely antecedent 

 grounds, the assumption is "infinitely precarious." 

 There is absolutely no justification for the state- 

 ment that in all the varied and complex processes of 

 organic nature natural selection is the only possible 



