46 



" Natural Selection 



an insult to nature. It amounts to this : that nature — in 

 order to prevent the earth being overrun by lions, and 

 the consequent destruction of the antelopes on which 

 they live, and thereafter of all other animals not cap- 

 able of withstanding their onslaught, later, the ex- 

 tinction of the human race, and finally, their own 

 annihilation through want of the means of subsistence- 

 was forced by some means of which we are entirely 

 ignorant to formulate an agency, operating in a fatal 

 manner during the process of dentition upon the 

 young of the greater cats only. This is our safeguard 

 against the war of species, the wreck of nature, and the 

 crack of doom ! 



Is it not pitiable in such able and competent 

 observers ? But they are not to blame — they were 

 ignorant of the real facts of nature in this instance. 

 It is true that a little of the divine gift of imagination 

 would have helped them much. It argues to a demon- 

 stration the limitation of the human intellect, of 

 which we omit to remind ourselves as frequently as we 

 ought. Dewar and Finn are always fair to every 

 argument, and it is something that they should say : 

 " Men of science not infrequently charge the clergy 

 with adhering to dogma in face of opposing facts ; it 

 seems to us that many of the apostles of science are in 

 this respect worse offenders than the most orthodox of 

 churchmen." " The average scientific man of to-day 

 makes facts fit his theory ; if they refuse to fit he 

 ignores or denies them." On page 27 we find : " Like 

 Darwin, we welcome all factors which appear to be 

 capable of effecting evolution. . . . We recognise the 

 strength and weakness of the Darwinian theory, we see 

 plainly it has the defect of the period in which it was 

 enunciated. The eighteenth century was the age of 

 cocksureness, the age in which all phenomena were 

 thought to be capable of simple explanation." Again 



