30 



of which the immediate or secondary causes are untraceable, 

 and which we cannot reduce to inductive law. That they are 

 subject to law may be — nay more, is — a reasonable inference, 

 though we are powerless to trace even the appearance of law. 

 It is only to those persons who do not see this that the word 

 chance in the sense in which it is used by naturalists implies 

 anything derogatory or lawless. When Mr. Darwin speaks of 

 chance in connection with natural selection^ he alludes to what 

 are facts, though he leaves his readers to infer that chance is but 

 an expression for certain phenomena of which the laws are as yet 

 untraceable. This may be illustrated by the weather. In this 

 climate it has been found impossible to reduce the changes to 

 anything like system or law beyond the most general ; and it 

 seems to be all a chance whether we are to have fine or wet 

 days. Yet observations are beginning to show that there is law 

 governing the averages, though we are powerless to bring every 

 day's phenomena into a general system. If we compare tropical 

 countries with our own, we find they are far more regular, and 

 consequently can be predicted with much greater precision. 



Now it is due to the fact that chance seems to occupy so 

 large a share of Mr. Darwin's system of the origin of species 

 by natural selection, that his opponents one and all have taken 

 him to task for it ; as implying a creation without a creator, 

 and for reviving, with but slight improvement upon, the old 

 Democrital philosophy. Even when he does let fall one or it 

 may be a few little waifs to show, as it were, whither the wind 

 listeth, it is instantly caught up by an opponent, paraded as a 

 mistake on Mr. Darwin's part, and that he evidently never 

 could have intended it to be there. Thus does the M.A., 

 author of Darwinism DeinoUshed, make a rhetorical sally upon 

 the gentle admission that the " works of the Creator greatly 

 surpass those of man. * It is in this want of some distinct 

 assertion from Mr. Darwin of natural selection being due 

 to law (assumed but unrepresented by perceptible facts) that he 

 has not done justice to himself; nor has he cared to consider 

 the short-sighted charges, not only of non-scientific, but 

 even many scientific men themselves. He has laid himself 

 open to misconstruction, and, as history itself can now show, 

 has aroused an enormous amount of bitterness of feeling, while 

 innumerable speeches have been delivered, and even books of 

 goodly proportions have issued from the press, to disprove what 



^ I quote from memory, p. 220, Origin of Species, 4th. ed., not having the 

 M.A.'s work before me, but the tenour of the remarks is strongly impressed 

 upon my memory.— The exact title of the work alluded to by Mr, Henslow 

 is The Darwinian Theory of the Transmutation of Species examined, by " a 

 Graduate of the University of Cambridge " (J. Nishet). — Ed. 



