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seed -pro- quantity of other things besides; nor does he even atteinpt 
plants. 1 n s an explanation of how any elements of oxygen, hydrogen, 
&c., got themselves made out of homogeneous atoms. 
It would make this paper far too long if I began describing 
specimens of evident contrivance in nature, and therefore I 
will content myself with referring to the latest scientific notice 
of a particular group of them in a paper by Sir J. Lubbock, 
in the Royal Institution Proceedings of 1882, on the curious 
contrivances for projecting the seeds of various plants far 
enough, and sometimes for performing other feats, to make 
them grow, which he says he could not believe himself 
until he saw them. In my Origin of Laws of Nature I cited 
another of his observations, of the modes in which certain 
plants “ protect themselves 33 from the ants who would steal 
their honey from the bees. What kind of natural selection 
or other automatic process can conceivably have had anything 
to do with such contrivances as those ? Such outstanding 
problems ought to make us more suspicious of the very 
doubtful solutions of some others, such as the two famous 
mathematical problems of bee-cells, especially in the face of 
the difficulty that no working bee had working parents to 
transmit their experience to her : remembering also that a 
new instinct or genius sometimes appears suddenly, as in 
the “ calculating boys 33 spoken of before. And, though we 
see that acquired experience can be transmitted through 
parents to a certain extent, that is itself quite as incompre- 
hensible as Mr. Spencer admits all other natural processes to 
be. It would have been pronounced impossible a priori that a 
microscopic germ or seed should have the power of attracting 
and assimilating other particles of matter into a compound 
possessing some of the acquired knowledge and all the other 
powers of the parents of that seed. That is the primary 
problem to be solved, whether for bees or flowers, or anything 
else which is supposed to improve in successive generations ; 
and the secondary one is the power of making variations ever 
so little better than before. 
Until some theory can be invented to account for all those 
stages of evolution from a microscopic particle, including its 
own generation, up to a philosopher, by any conceivable self- 
existing forces out of homogeneous self-existing matter, and 
also for the production of all natural beauty — not merely a little 
of it — all the phrases that have been invented pretending to 
account for these things are nothing more than words. Natural 
selections, sexual selections, survivals of the fittest, atavisms, 
heredities, and I don't know how many more, may all be 
