comes it that there would be 'no limit to the beauty' of organized beings? On such a system we should rather have expected that there would be no limit to the ugliness.' And how comes it that we, the most exalted and improved of apes, have come to appreciate beauty and to admire it, and to be fascinated with it in form, colour, harmony, contrivance, and adaptation? who gave us this faculty to admire beauty? Natural Selection was our maker, and yet Natural Selection takes no account of beauty; how can we have got any faculty but as we derived it by improvement from our forefathers, the anthropoidal patriarchs of the tropical forests? Is it an improvement to comprehend and admire beauty? It either is or is not an improvement; if it is, then Natural Selection, which disregards beauty, improved us by enabling us to value it! Our creatrix, therefore, improved us by making us esteem that which she disapproves! Surely this must be regarded as a mistake. Or if it be not a mistake, then it is no improvement to have an eye and a taste for beauty; and the blue-tailed baboons, and the howling monkeys, and the hideous gorillas are superior to us in the satisfaction they feel in their fiendlike females.

But this is not all: if feeble man can do much by his powers of selection,'-what does man do? He makes varieties, and cannot make anything more, and if he withholds his hand the varieties disappear; but Nature, according to the Theory, makes new species. Here then is implied, that which is implied throughout the whole Theory, that variety and mutation are the same. When we produce by cultivation a new variety of a rose, we know how far we have gone, and we know that we have not made a new species, and cannot do so; but if a rose

this result, being artificial, disappears with the attention. which has produced it.

'When a horticulturist chooses his best specimens for reproduction, or simply suppresses the worst, it is evident that the descendants obtained by this process will present, on an average, a higher degree of improvement. But if this process of careful selection is relaxed, the new race falls back into its state of anterior equilibrium.

'Mr Darwin, it is true, imagines an effect of a struggle for life, which would fulfil, in an unconscious and permanent manner, this function of Observer, adequate to destroy the inferior creatures. In this view of the question, Mr Darwin seems to us to be greatly in error, for a struggle for life is injurious to all that are subject to it, good as well as bad.

When two plants or two animals press upon one another and dispute for existence, they injure one another mutually much more than they make a difference between two subjects of the same Species; if one triumphs over the other, it is simply that the one which has been less injured gains the victory.

'Supposing ten trees should fix their roots where one only could have successfully grown without this struggle or competition, the ten, in spite of this competition, or rather on account of it, will grow miserably stunted. Neverthe. less competition has played its part in hindering the development of many seeds and off-sets.

If ill-fed animals fall upon a meagre pasture, the more insufficient it is, the more do they devour it with an eager competition. Nevertheless the most favoured is far from being satisfied, as he might have been if he had been alone, that is to say, without this struggle for food.

If a tribe of people is expelled from a good soil to a miserable one, as the Irish of Armagh and Down, who were driven into the barony of Flews, the struggle for life becomes indeed serious, but they nevertheless all degenerate. It does not terminate in some of them improving, and becoming greatly superior to the others.

'In one word, the struggle for life only keeps the productive power of beings, the germs of which are always superabundant, in an equilibrium with the resources of the soil; and nothing authorizes Mr Darwin to suppose that the very feeble difference of action with which it bears on individuals of the same species, is superior to the injurious competition with which it acts on all of them.

'Mr Darwin, like many others, wanted an explanation for the phenomena which surround us, and he has not perceived that everywhere and in all times beings were developed in proportion to the qualities of the soil to which they belong. The augmentation of these qualities must therefore determine the qualities of the beings themselves' (228).

'According to Mr Darwin, this law of progress by Selection only takes account of cases of perfection; and cannot, as he himself acknowledges, account for cases of degeneracy, which are nevertheless so very numerous. Thus is he driven by his system to deny every instance of the sort. Nevertheless no one will admit that the white man has made progress in assuming the negro type, although Mr Darwin can say with reason that the constitution of the negro agrees better than ours with the contions of life in Central Africa-in the same way that the constitution of the earth-worm agrees better with its condition than ours. Moreover, in explaining how it is that the island and the little continents have fewer species than

fins her the cause of the genking of the absence of sits so fisted in the

internetate "uteries which Aout to which lending errands, he says:f we const al maps and ene where meet with the inmerible firms of Transition, that depends chiefy on the action of Natural Rejection, by simile of which new varieties constantly tend to mppant and exterminate their original stock." That deplans continued extinctions, but not the degrees. Besick this we suppose that geological documents have only kept imperfect register of these transformations. That could not explain those general and regular gaps in the

4

evidence, and the apparent phase of stability which characterizes the Species. Moreover, these two explanations of the same phenomenon do not agree; is it the one, or is it the other, that is really the agent?

The struggle for life brings about a general destruction of the inferior beings by the superiors. But as this action operates from one end to the other of the scale of beings, there would be no means of distinguishing the Species. This would be the result, that only the advanced being, less influenced by that condition, would have more advantages to injure the being which would be immediately beneath it.

'Notwithstanding all these contradictions which Mr Darwin's Theory receives from the facts which we have placed under the eyes of the reader, his book contains a number of interesting remarks. His ideas of conformation and appropriation of beings, with regard to the functions which they have to fulfil, and the circumstances in which they live, had already been indicated by Lamarck, who himself only gave an explanation of more ancient ideas. The merit* of Mr Darwin is that he has given them more development and more consistence.

In another passage Mr Darwin himself recognizes, if not the error of his Theory, at least the limits of its effects, which amounts almost to the same thing. These are his

* 'Le mérite de M. Darwin est de leur avoir donné plus de développement, plus de consistence' (236).

It is by no means certain that Mr Darwin will relish this compliment. M. Pouchet also says: 'M. Darwin est le continuateur direct de Lamarck.' (Pluralité des Races, 173.)

M. Flourens confirms all this: 'Le fait est que Lamarck est le père de M. Darwin. Il a commencé son système. Toutes les idées de Lamarck sont, au fond, celles de M. Darwin. M. Darwin ne le dit pas d'abord; il a trop d'art pour cela' (15).