16 Proceedings of the Newport Natural History Society. 
no cognizance of design in the order of nature — physical 
forces, fortuitous variations, accidental conditions are the 
only controlling influences it will admit. A creature be¬ 
comes what it is by virtue of accident alone. There can 
be in nature no such thing as contrivance (though Darwin 
often uses the word figuratively). One of the strongest 
objections to the efficiency of natural selection lies in the 
fact that an incipient useful variation may not only be of 
no advantage to an animal or plant but may be positively 
disadvantageous unless accompanied by concomitant varia¬ 
tion of related parts. For example, an increase in the size 
and consequently the weight of the antlers of a stag would 
be detrimental instead of advantageous to that animal, unless 
accompanied by corresponding increase in the size of the 
muscles of the neck. In other words a variation in order 
to be useful must occur under conditions which render its 
preservation concurrent with so many accidents of place and 
order that it is extremely unlikely that it should be of 
sufficiently frequent occurrence to affect in any marked de¬ 
gree the specific type In many cases, an organ (formed, 
as Darwin affirms, by slow fortuitious variation) may be 
actually injurious to its possessor. Thus for example, 
the rudimentary wing of a bird. Here is an organ which 
in its perfect state is decidedly advantageous to the bird, 
but in its rudimentary state, as the Duke of Argyll points 
out, it is useful neither for swimming, walking, nor flying. 
In the immense periods of time which it takes to bring an 
organ to perfection, the rudimentary wing should, on Dar¬ 
win’s premises, have been aborted, since it would have been 
distinctly disadvantageous to its possessor. 
Again natural selection does not satisfactorily account 
for the independent origin of similar structures in widely 
separated groups, such as the eyes of vertebrates and cut¬ 
tlefishes, and the bird’s head processes in the polyzoa 
and echini. On the supposition that the structures of ani¬ 
mals are made up, as Darwin affirms, of indefinite, fortui¬ 
tous, minute variations, the chances of the independent 
