252 TROPICAL NATURE, AND OTHER ESSAYS. 



gorgeous train of the peacock and of the two kinds of 

 flower in the primrose ? The solution of these and a 

 hundred other problems of like nature was rarely ap- 

 proached by the old method of study, or if approached 

 was only the subject of vague speculation. It is to the 

 illustrious author of the Origin of Species that we 

 are indebted for teaching us how to study nature as one 

 great, compact, and beautifully-adjusted system. Under 

 the touch of his magic wand the countless isolated facts 

 of internal and external structure of living things — 

 their habits, their colours, their development, their distri- 

 bution, their geological history, — all fell into their ap- 

 proximate places ; and although, from the intricacy of 

 the subject and our very imperfect knowledge of the 

 facts themselves, much still remains uncertain, yet w^e 

 can no longer doubt that even the minutest and most 

 superficial peculiarities of animals^ and plants either, on 

 the one hand, are or have been useful to them, or, on 

 the other hand, have been developed under the influence 

 of general laws, which we may one day understand to a 

 much greater extent than we do at present. So great is 

 the alteration eff'ected in our comprehension of nature 

 by the study of variation, inheritance, cross-breeding, 

 competition, distribution, protection, and selection — 

 showing, as they often do, the meaning of the most 

 obscure phenomena and the mutual dependence of the 

 most widely-separated organisms — that it can only be 

 fitly compared with the analogous alteration produced 

 in our conception of the universe by Newton's grand 

 discovery of the law of gravitation. 



I know it will be said (and is said), that Darwin is 

 too highly rated, that some of his theories are wholly 



