1 68 Cells; or, Evolution. 



which evolution might have marched) has disap- 

 peared; there is a breaking up into groups and sub- 

 groups and sub-sub-groups, which do not admit of 

 being placed in serial order, but only in divergent 

 and re-divergent order." So much for nature as 

 it is. 



1 88. Possibly nature has changed her ways, and 



become capricious in her old age. Has 

 was"™** 81 she? What becomes of science if she 



has ? Science had better drop the sub- 

 ject and take to a more useful occupation. If the 

 combining properties of oxygen and hydrogen have 

 altered, and are no longer what they were; if the 

 melting point of platinum or the freezing point of 

 mercury was different 5,000 years ago from what it is 

 to-day; then possibly, and only then, has there been 

 a change in the laws of life. But if the chemical 

 element has a history from the time it first was, and 

 that history has been one of the precisest law, then 

 life, no less than chemistry, has its own history, one 

 of the precisest law, which we see in the present, 

 and which must have held in the past. Nay, what 

 else is the meaning of the talk about " the great 

 secular processes of the Darwinian laws," if laws 

 are not laws, and if caprice is to dominate over na- 

 ture ? " If the simplest forms of the present and 

 the past were not governed," asks Dr. Dallinger, 

 " by accurate and unchanging laws of life, how did 

 the rigid certainties that manifestly and admittedly 

 govern the more complex and the most complex 



