Vii 
CREATION BY LAW 
159 
determined at the right time and place by the will of the 
Creator. Every race produced by the florist or the breeder, 
the dog or the pigeon fancier, the ratcatcher, the sporting man, 
or the slave-hunter, must have been provided for by varieties 
occurring when wanted ; and as these variations were never 
withheld, it would prove that the sanction of an all -wise 
and all-powerful Being has been given to that which the 
highest human minds consider to be trivial, mean, or debasing. 
This appears to be a complete answer to the theory that 
variation sufficient in amount to be accumulated in a given 
direction must be the direct act of the creative mind, but it is 
also sufficiently condemned by being so entirely unnecessary. 
The facility with which man obtains new races depends chiefly 
upon the number of individuals he can procure to select from. 
When hundreds of florists or breeders are all aiming at the 
same object, the work of change goes on rapidly. But a 
common species in nature contains a thousand or a million- 
fold more individuals than any domestic race ; and survival 
of the fittest must unerringly preserve all that vary in the 
right direction, not only in obvious characters but in minute 
details — not only in external but in internal organs ; so that if 
the materials are sufficient for the needs of man, there can be 
no want of them to fulfil the grand purpose of keeping up a 
supply of modified organisms, exactly adapted to the changed 
conditions that are always occurring in the inorganic world. 
The Objection that there are Limits to Variation 
Having now, I believe, fairly answered the chief objections 
of the Duke of Argyll, I proceed to notice one or two of those 
adduced in an able and argumentative essay on the “ Origin 
of Species” in the North British Review for July 1867. The 
writer first attempts to prove that there are strict limits to 
variation. When we begin to select variations in any one 
direction, the process is comparatively rapid, but after a con- 
siderable amount of change has been effected it becomes 
slower and slower, till at length its limits are reached and no 
care in breeding and selection can produce any further advance. 
The racehorse is chosen as an example. It is admitted that, 
with any ordinary lot of horses to begin with, careful selection 
would in a few years make a great improvement, and in a 
