386 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
subject to many conditions, of which at present we know as little 
of one as the other. This phenomenon may be seen in many 
ways, quite independent of environmental conditions. Plants 
would certainly be thought to flower in response to the climatic 
conditions of the year; yet Kerner observed the earliest date of 
flowering of a number of willows growing in the Botanic Garden 
at Innsbruck for a period of twelve years, and thus not only 
arrived at an average date for the first opening of the male 
flowers in some fifty different kinds of Salix, but, as he remarks : 
—‘Tt will be observed that the two alpine willows, Salix retusa 
and S. jacquiniana, flowered on an average in the twelve years on 
the same day, and that their hybrid, S. retusoides, kept also to 
that date.”* Again, every angler knows—at least everyone of 
experience and observation—that, as the Countess of Malmesbury 
has expressed it, ‘‘ each river has certain hours during which the 
fish rise in preference to any other.” t But the “law” of natural 
selection had as much a beginning in time, and in biological time, 
as the “ moral law”’—practised in some form or another by the 
greater part of mankind—must have been unknown to our more 
bestial ancestors ; little understood by prehistoric man, and only 
fully developed as human civilization and slavery advanced hand 
in hand, through peace and plenty, through misery and despair. 
In fact, the term “ natural law’”’ is as loose and ill-defined as that 
of “moral law.” All that we see, all that we can reduce to 
rational conception, are natural phenomena, different or more 
evolved to-day than what little we know of them in the past; 
while that scanty record represents merely an appreciation of a 
form of evolution which took place in time estimated only by 
theoretical calculation, and under conditions of which we practi- 
cally know nothing. We see sequences of natural phenomena, 
which we call natural laws, and we can no more realize the 
antecedents of these phenomena than we can conceive an era 
when our so-called natural laws were neither existent, necessary, 
nor consequent. We are thus compelled to seek a time prior to 
or independent of natural selection, or else logically to apply it 
ledge, but only with a strong inherited impulse to undertake the habit or 
function”’ (‘The Migration of Birds,’ amend. edit. 1897, p. 100). 
* Kerner and Oliver, ‘ Nat. Hist. Plants,’ vol. ii. p. 574. 
+ ‘Badminton Mag.’ vol. i. p. 45. 
