a strong tendency to bear flowers with separated sexes. When the sexes are separated, although the male and female flowers may be produced on the same tree, we can see that pollen must be regularly carried from flower to flower, and this will give a better chance of pollen being occasionally carried from tree to tree' (105).

These observations are to establish a point which need not be contested, that occasional intercrossing with distinct individuals tends to the vigour and fertility of all organized beings. How Mr Darwin meets this in the case of great trees with innumerable flowers we see, but the main point to observe is that this provision for intercrossing is by a premeditated arrangement of Nature.— Nature has largely provided '-this of course means Natural Selection; but whatever it might be, we find, according to this statement, that there is a large provision to secure the intercrossing by giving to trees a tendency to bear flowers with separate sexes.

Had we said as much as this of a design of creative wisdom there can be little doubt how it would have been received by the Transmutationists, but when the manifest intent of this provision' is attributed to that which is understood not to be creation, it passes as advanced philosophy. This, however, is certain, that if anything of this sort has really taken place, if there has been a large provision for a certain object, by giving certain trees this peculiarity, there must have been an Intellect to provide and a Power to give; and if so, the fact would be fatal to the Theory.

Again we hear it stated still stronger: In many cases there are special contrivances which effectually prevent the

stigma receiving pollen from its own flower; for instance, in Lobelia fulgens, there is really a beautiful and elaborate contrivance by which all the infinitely numerous pollengranules are swept out of the conjoined anthers of each flower, before the stigma of that individual flower is ready to receive them' (103).

This contrivance' is to prevent self-fertilization, and to necessitate crossing with another plant. And the contrivance is beautiful and elaborate;' nevertheless, in this system there is no design and nothing that can contrive. A system that has to be upheld by such flagrant contradictions as these must indeed be tottering to its fall.

But a still more curious statement is contained in the following passage: The tubes of the corollas of the common red and incarnate clovers do not, on a hasty glance, appear to differ in length; yet the hive-bee can easily suck the nectar out of the incarnate clover, but not out of the common red clover, which is visited by humble-bees alone, so that whole fields of the red clover offer in vain an abundant supply of precious nectar to the hive-bees. . . . . if humble-bees were to become rare in any country, it might be a great advantage to the red clover to have a shorter or more deeply divided tube in its corolla, so that

* Compare with this, passages in the Fertilization of Orchids' :'To save this waste and exhaustion special and admirable contrivances were necessary for safely placing the pollen-masses on the stigma-and thus we can partially understand why Orchids have been made more highly endowed in this respect than other plants' (356).

'The simple fact that some Malaxeæ have only a single pollen-mass necessitates that extraordinary pains should have been taken in their fertilization, otherwise the plants would have been barren' (Id.).

It is truly marvellous that with such thoughts and such language Mr Darwin can have persuaded himself that blind matter, without an agent, can have executed these 'admirable contrivances.'

the hive-bee should visit its flowers. Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously, or one after another, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by the continual preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure' (100).

One would think that this passage must, even to its author, appear a reductio ad absurdum of the system. Red clover finding itself in a state of hopeless celibacy, owing to the absence of humble-bees, begins slightly modifying its structure to meet a prospective slight modification of the structure of the hive-bee. The hive-bee, with great good nature, begins to alter its own organization in order to meet the inclinations of the red clover; and thus by this simultaneous process of slow modification on the part of the flower and the insect, they become perfectly modified and adapted to one another.' A profitable arrangement to both parties, as the bee gets the honey, and the red clover fertility!' But this of course is not accomplished without the usual slaughter on both sides, for it is by the 'continual preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure,' that is, some millions of races of bees, and some millions of crops of improving red clover, are continually undergoing extermination, till at the end of a million or more of years red clover and hive-bees are perfectly adapted to one another.

One cannot but admire, in this picture, the spirit of self-sacrifice in the hive-bees, for as they get on very well with the present arrangement, and have done since the beginning of things, without the red clover, one can see no

reason why they should give themselves up to extermination for a million of years, to obtain that which they do not want. It is, moreover, to be remembered that the breed of improving bees must depend on the queen, the sole mother of the hive. She, therefore, who never gathers honey herself and never visits any flower, must have resolved to lay eggs, which shall produce insects kindly intentioned to the red clover, &c., &c., &c.

And this is the system' which is to banish the belief of the creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification of their structure' (101).

These specimens of the mode of reasoning by which the Theory is upheld will be sufficient, though there is no lack of many similar statements if it were requisite to adduce them. We have seen enough to convince us that the argument of design, which it is in many quarters now the fashion to deride as puerile and obsolete, is largely used where it is least of all admissible, in the dogmas of that school which pretends to have mapped* out creation on an atheistic plan; and that the leaders of that school are continually talking of contrivancest without a contriver, of plans and adaptations without intellect to devise them, and of beauty and skill in organized structures, though they declare that premeditated beauty and skill would be fatal to their theory. The attributes of power and wisdom, hitherto considered inseparable from the Creator, they

Mr Darwin speaks of 'Nature worked out by Natural Selection.'Orchids, 278.

'No one who advanced so far in philosophy as to have thought of one thing in relation to another, will ever be satisfied with laws which had no author, works which had no maker, and co-ordinations which had no designer.'-Phillips' Life on the Earth, 43.

ignore; and invent another power which is but an allegory, and has only a verbal existence, and yet they scruple not to say that they can see no limit to THIS POWER (Natural Selection) in slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex relations of life' (502).*

This advantage, then, at any rate, we have in arguing with Mr Darwin, that we believe there really is a Power that can, and has done, all these things, by supreme exercise of intellect and will; Mr Darwin does not believe this, and yet he continually is making use of language implying that he does believe it.

The explanation of this is, that he feels by the force of reason that to be necessary and indispensable which his Theory condemns.

This great question of design brings us ultimately to the beginning of life, which Mr Darwin calls the Origin of Species, and which it is the professed object of his book to explain. In this, as we have seen, he has failed, as he has only explained up to a certain point, which does not reach the origin. He tells us of a primordial spore of the lowest algæ from which all animal and vegetable life was evolved, but the origin of the great parent he leaves untouched.

It is, however, a remarkable circumstance that in the edition of his work of the year 1859, from which Professor Phillips has made his quotations, and from which many

Every naturalist who has dissected some of the beings as now ranked very low in the scale, must have been struck with their really wondrous and beautiful organization (135).

'Whenever the period of activity comes on, the adaptation of the larve to its conditions of life is just as perfect and beautiful as in the adult animal' (472).