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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 Demolished , 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 showj 
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. Nisbefj . — Ed. 
