254 
Scientific Arrogance. 
[May, 
back as 1842, I found myself constrained to conclude that, 
if we once admit the power of circumstances to effedt any 
change, however small, in animal forms, its efficiency to 
produce further change must be governed by the presence or 
absence of the necessary modifying conditions, to which 
alone must he assigned any actual limit. That circumstances 
were capable of producing some degree of change had never 
been disputed by any intelligent person. Distinguished 
naturalists had contended that the dog never existed in a 
state of primitive nature, but that it was the result of an 
intermixture of several species ; and others, equally eminent, 
contended that it was a modification of the wolf, the jackal, 
or the fox. No one disputed that circumstances might 
wonderfully modify any particular species, and such modifi- 
cations were known as varieties, and strikingly exemplified 
in the many different forms of the dog. I thus reasoned : — 
“ If, as is admitted, circumstances can so change the form 
and nature of the wolf as to produce a dog, why may cir- 
cumstances not so operate upon the dog as to produce a 
further change of like extent ? And what reason have we 
to conclude that the change may not go on indefinitely ? 
Or — to express the idea mathematically — if 1 (the wolf) 
may, by circumstances, be turned into 2 (the dog), why may 
not 2 be changed into 3 (some other animal differing as much 
from the dog as the latter differs from the wolf), 3 into 4, 
and so on to any extent ?” 
The modern term for such transmutation of species as 
thus seems inevitable, if the necessary conditions are pre- 
sent, is “ Evolution,” and hundreds of volumes have been 
written, during the past twenty years, in its support ; but it 
appears to me that the words I have quoted fully establish 
the possibility of unlimited change. In “ The Origin of 
Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation 
of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” Mr. Charles 
Darwin enters into an elaborate explanation of a process by 
which the transmutation of species may have taken place. 
I have no fault to find with his mode of showing that 
“ natural selection ” is an agent capable of producing an 
infinite amount of change in animal forms. He has been 
wonderfully successful in establishing the dodtrine that ani- 
mals now existing may have been evolved from simpler 
forms which lived in the earlier periods of geological history; 
but nevertheless he hesitates to set up “ natural selection ” 
as the all-sufficient origin of species, and a belief in their 
absolute immutability is really a remnant of the Paganism 
which discovered spirits, gods, or demons in all the most 
