life which the Darwinian theory postulates, then they must have been supernaturally created. We return to the miracle-the sudden production of things by a Supernatural Personal Creator from blank nonentity--the production of effects without prior natural causes or conditions, and by a process respecting which neither science nor human thought can form any conception. The miracle, from which spontaneous generation would deliver us, and which puts reason to confusion, once again returns, after being everywhere expelled from the wide territory of Science.

§ 4. Without further comment for the present on the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, let us resume the story of creation, which, it should be observed, from the production of the first planet from the nebular vapour, to the production of the first human being from a lower form. of life, covers much more than the six days' paroxysmal creative labour as recorded in Genesis, necessitating, as it did, many hundreds, perhaps thousands of millions of for its slow evolutionary achievement.

years

We have learned the origin of the worlds of space, according to Kant, Laplace, and the physicists; of the world of life in the dim ocean-deeps, according to Oken, Haeckel, and the naturalists; there remains to be told by Science the origin of the multitudinous and varied species of animals and plants, even should we admit that Nature, the allbountiful mother, herself unwittingly accomplished the first grand preliminary feat in the spontaneous production of the rudest and simplest forms of life. From the rude and simple to the refined and complex; from the homogeneous moneron to the heterogeneous mammal; from the "few primordial forms" of life which Darwin begins with, and which, let us suppose, have resulted from the due colloca

tion of the chemical atoms after many abortive tentatives, up to the endlessly varied and highly elaborated forms of life which science to-day contemplates, there is still a vast distance. And the question now rises, How have all these various species in the organic world arisen? How has the elementary life run into such endlessly varied forms, each distinguished by its special kind and degree of adaptations and beauty? Above all, how has life, starting from such low beginnings, soared to such lofty heights in man himself, severed, seemingly, on all sides from the other species by a great gulf apparently not to be bridged, as shown in his outward form, and yet more in his inward nature and in its still growing capacities of invention, of art, of thought, of disinterested virtuous endeavour ?

For answer to this most important question we must consult the books of Darwin and of those who have worked in the lines indicated in his world-famed theory. As we there learn, the higher species of plants and animals, including man, were derived from the lower, and all ultimately from "one or a few primordial forms," through the agency of Natural Selection combined with the fact of Inheritance; the first representing the changing and progressive, the second, the conservative factor in the great process of organic evolution. Nature, or to speak more precisely, a complicated but yet connected and continuous process called Natural Selection, whose action has extended over unimaginable ages, and is still at work, was the unconscious sculptor and mechanician that slowly-extremely slowly-elaborated all the various forms of life that we now behold, as well as many long since extinct species. Natural selection it was that separated the different species from each other; that carved their organs gradually, and ever

more carefully, from rough rudimentary attempts, and that fitted them each to the other and all to their environment -an unconscious artist, that worked by seemingly disconnected efforts and without any plan or preconception of the result to be finally achieved, but who nevertheless, by the simplest means, reached at length the most surprising and splendid results. For, by acting on the simple rule of selecting those individuals the best fitted to their surrounding conditions to continue their kind, and soon or late letting drop the ill-fitted, and by an undeviating repetition of the process and adherence to the rule, Nature has attained to all the wonderful and varied life that we behold. Moreover, by acting in this manner, she evolved ever higher as well as ever different types. By this means she slowly evolved the wing of the bird, the fin of the fish, the foot of the mammal,-all the different propellers from common germinal beginnings; by this means, by natural selection only, from an optic nerve, coated with pigment and tingling in the sunlight, she elaborated and perfected the living miracle of the human eye, and adapted its lens to the properties of light; finally, by this means she evolved the civilized man from the savage, the savage from the brute, and the brute, through ever lower lines, from the mollusc and the moneron;-results so marvellous without the Darwinian clue, that men were compelled to refer them to the action of a Supernatural and Omnipotent Creator, who, according to our anthropomorphic habits of thought, still worked after our human fashion in fulfilment of a plan and purpose.

Thus Natural Selection, by seizing on favourable variations accidentally offered, by accumulating and intensifying these, and by thereafter handing them on as a constantly

increasing capital, from generation to generation, in the fact of inheritance, succeeded in producing all the variety of plant and animal life that now exists. But for the most part, she finished her species myriads of years ago, and has made little alteration since in the type. And having elaborated all her forms, she did her best to efface all traces of her methods of work, and of the slow and laborious steps by which she reached her ends, which, now that we have discovered them, seem at a first view as startling, when morally regarded, as they are simple from the point of view of mechanical contrivance; consisting simply in invariably favouring the strong and the successful, and in leaving the weak to perish in the eternal and necessary "struggle for existence." Nature had only shown to us the finished article of her manufacture, and we all in our ignorance admired greatly; she had carefully reserved the secret of her processes, which would have much diminished our admiration. It is to Darwin that we owe the drawing aside of the mysterious curtain behind which Nature had carried on her secret operations in the elaboration of her species and varieties. He has explained it to us, and the marvel ceases. He it is who has taken us into her inmost laboratory, and shown her at her labour and in her working dress. He it is first and chiefly who has surprised Nature in the act, who has discovered her secret, and disclosed the processes by which, after long-continued practice, she has reached in some cases so great and splendid results.

But if Darwin has diminished our wonder, by showing us the secret of Nature's mechanical skill, he has aroused other, and some of them disquieting, sentiments. For what a process, according to his showing, Evolution has been!

One long-continued battle without quarter, raging fiercely over the whole animal kingdom, and carried on even into the vegetable kingdom, though there less cruelly, because there is no attendant consciousness; a struggle between species and species, where the weak is ever the prey of the strong; and a still more deadly and concentrated struggle carried on within the limits of each species, amongst the component individuals, compelled to compete with each other for the same precarious supply of food which, however cruelly procured, is always less than the demand for it; a conflict where, unless in the few social species, it is to “the near in blood the nearer bloody." Indeed, the revelations of the Darwinian story are in many cases by no means agreeable to dwell upon, although as our own species-the crown and finished masterpiece of Nature's workmanship— has emerged supreme victor from the universal trial by combat, and upon the whole has come well out of the long chapter of most disastrous chances for other species living and extinct, it seems, according to Darwin and Spencer, that, all things considered, we ought to congratulate ourselves on our good fortune. At least, there has been no fall of man; on the contrary, there has been a wonderful rise, that could scarce in reason have been expected at first. There has been no degradation, but a constant and stillcontinuing development, which opens out great vistas of promise for our future and still more selected successors.

§ 5. Nevertheless, what strikes us most in reading this marvellous story of the origin and process of manufacture of Nature's living forms, is the seemingly chance affair it all was. We are not permitted, on Darwinian principles, to suppose that there was any prevision or forecast of what was to come resident in Nature's blind bosom. There was