allowed an ant to visit them, and it immediately the observations which I have myself made in seemed by its cager way of running about, to be well aware what a rich flock it had discovered. It then began to play with its antennæ on the abdomen first of one aphis and then of another, and each aphis, as soon as it felt the antennæ, immediately lifted up its abdomen and excreted a limpid drop of sweet juice, which was eagerly devoured by the ant. Even the quite young aphides behaved in this manner, showing that the action was instinctive, and not the result of experience."-Pp. 210, 211. Or take the following admirable specimen of the union of which we have spoken, of the employment of the observations of others with what he has observed himself, in that which is almost the most marvellous of facts -the slave-making instinct of certain ants. We say nothing at present of the place assigned to these facts in Mr. Darwin's argument, but are merely referring to the collection, observation, and statement of the facts themselves: some little detail. I opened fourteen nests of F. sanguinea, and found a few slaves in each. Males and fertile females of the slave-species (F. fusca) are found only in their own proper communities, and have never been observed in the nests of F. sanguinea. The slaves are black, and not above half the size of their red masters, so that the contrast in their appearance is very great. When the nest is slightly disturbed, the slaves occasionally come out, and, like their masters, are much agitated, and defend the nest. When the nest is much disturbed, and the larvæ and pupa are exposed, the slaves work energetically with their masters in carrying them away to a place of safety. Hence it is clear that the slaves feel quite at home. During the months of June and July, in three successive years, I have watched for many hours several nests in Surrey and Sussex, and never saw a slave either leave or enter a nest. As, during these months, that they might behave differently when more the slaves are very few in number, I thought numerous, but Mr. Smith informs me that he has watched nests at various hours during May, June, and August, both in Surrey and Hampshire, and has never seen the slaves, though "Slave-making Instinct.-This remarkable in- present in large numbers in August, either leave stinct was first discovered in the Formica (Pol-or enter the nest. Hence he considers them as yerges) rufescens by Pierre Huber, a better observer even than his celebrated father. This ant is absolutely dependent on its slaves; without their aid the species would certainly become extinct in a single year. The males and fertile females do not work. The workers or sterile females, though most energetic and courageous in capturing slaves, do no other work. They are incapable of making their own nests or of feeding their own larve. When the old nest is found inconvenient, and they have to migrate, it is the slaves which determine the migration, and actually carry their masters in their jaws. So utterly helpless are the masters, that when Huber shut up thirty of them without a slave, but with plenty of the food which they like best, and with their larvæ and pupa to stimulate them to work, they did nothing; they could not even feed themselves, and many perished of hunger. Huber then introduced a single slave (F. fusca), and she instantly set to work, fed and saved the survivors, made some cells and tended "One day I fortunately witnessed a migrathe larvæ, and put all to rights. What can be tion of F. sanguinea from one nest to another, more extraordinary than these well-ascertained and it was a most interesting spectacle to behold facts? If we had not known of any other slave-the masters carefully carrying (instead of being making ant, it would have been hopeless to have speculated how so wonderful an instinct could have been perfected. Another species (Formica sanguinea) was likewise first discovered by P. Huber to be a slave-making ant. This species is found in the southern parts of England, and its habits have been attended to by Mr. F. Smith, of the British Museum, to whom I am much indebted for information on this and other subjects. Although fully trusting to the statements of Huber and Mr. Smith, I tried to approach the subject in a sceptical frame of mind, as any one may well be excused for doubting the truth of so extraordinary and odious an instinct as that of making slaves. Hence I give strictly household slaves. The masters, on the other hand, may be constantly seen bringing in materials for the nest, and food of all kinds. During the present year, however, in the month of July, I came across a community with an unusually large stock of slaves, and I observed a few slaves mingled with their masters leaving the nest, and marching along the same road to a large Scotch fir-tree, twenty-five yards distant, which they ascended together, probably in search of aphides or cocci. According to Huber, who had ample opportunities for observation, in Switzerland, the slaves habitually work with their masters in making the nest, and they alone open and close the doors in the morning and evening; and, as Huber expressly states, their principal office is to search for aphides. This difference in the usual habits of the masters and slaves in the two countries probably depends merely on the slaves being captured in greater numbers in Switzerland than in England. carried by, as in the case of F. rufescens) their slaves in their jaws. Another day my attention was struck by about a score of the slave-makers haunting the same spot, and evidently not in search of food: they approached, and were vig. orously repulsed by an independent community of the slave species (F. fusca), sometimes as many as three of these ants clinging to the legs of the slave-making F. sanguinea. The latter ruthlessly killed their small opponents, and carried their dead bodies as food to their nest, twenty-nine yards distant, but they were prevented from getting any pupa to rear as slaves. I then dug up a small parcel of pupæ of F. fusca from another nest, and put them down on a bare spot near the place of combat; they were eagerly We can perhaps best convey to our readseized and carried off by the tyrants, who per-ers a clear view of Mr. Darwin's chain of haps fancied that, after all, they had been victorious in their late combat. "At the same time I laid on the same place a small parcel of the pups of another species (F. flava), with a few of these little yellow ants still clinging to the fragments of the nest. This is sometimes, though rarely, made into slaves, as has been described by Mr. Smith. Although so small a species, it is very courageous, and I have seen it ferociously attack other ants. In one instance I found to my surprise an independent community of F. flava under a stone bencath a nest of the slave-making F. sanguinea, and when I had accidentally disturbed both nests, the little ants attacked their big neighbors with surprising courage. "Now I was curious to ascertain whether F. sanguinea could distinguish the pupa of F. fusca, which they habitually make into slaves, from those of the little and furious F. flava, which they rarely capture, and it was evident that they did at once distinguish them, for we have seen that they eagerly and instantly seized the pupa of F. fusca, whereas they were much terrified when they came across the pupa or even the earth from the nest of F. flava, and quickly ran away; but in about a quarter of an hour, shortly after all the little yellows ants had crawled away, they took heart and carried off the pupa. "One evening I visited another community of F. sanguinea, and found a number of these ants returning home and entering their nests, carry. ing the dead bodies of F. fusca (showing that it was not a migration) and numerous pupæ. I traced a long file of ants burthened with this booty for about forty yards to a very thick clump of heath, whence I saw the last individual of F. sanguinea emerge, carrying a pupa, but I was not able to find the desolated nest in the thick heath. The nest, however, must have been close at hand, for two or three individuals of F. fusca were rushing about in the greatest agitation, and one was perched motionless with its own pupa in its mouth on the top of a spray of heath, an image of despair over its ravaged home."-P. 219, 223. Now, all this is, we think, really charming writing. We feel as we walk abroad with Mr. Darwin very much as the favored object of the attention of the dervise must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his eye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, and diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, and rubies, which were sparkling unregarded beneath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes save those which the dervise had enlightened. But here we are bound to say our pleasure terminates; for when we turn with Mr. Darwin to his argument," we are almost immediately at variance with him. It is as an 66 argument" that the essay is put forward; as an argument we will test it. reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them, first, the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them; next, the leading propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final inference; and then the mode by which he endeavors to support his propositions. The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great Earth-Musuem around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son,-“ animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number" (p. 484), as Mr. Darwin at first somewhat diffidently suggests; or rather, as, growing bolder when he has once pronounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to us, from one single head : Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that ALL ANIMALS and PLANTS have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. . . . Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth" (man therefore of course included) "have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the Creator."-P. 484. This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast, creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants of some one individual cns, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us. This is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to arrive at. To find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms, and flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor, perhaps of the nucleated cell of some primæval fungus, which alone possessed the distinguishing honor of being the "one primordial form into which Mr. Darwin finds then the disseminating life was first breathed by the Creator"-this, and improving power, which he needs to acto say the least of it, is no common discov- count for the development of new forms in naery-no very expected conclusion. But we ture, in the principle of " Natural Selection," are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy which is evolved in the strife for room to live to start back from any conclusion by reason and flourish which is evermore maintained of its strangeness. Newton's patient phi- between themselves by all living things. losophy taught him to find in the falling apple One of the most interesting parts of Mr. the law which governs the silent movements Darwin's volume is that in which he estabof the stars in their courses; and if Mr. Dar-lishes this law of natural selection; we say win can with the same correctness of reason- establishes, because-repeating that we difing demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms, fer from him totally in the limits which he would assign to its action-we have no doubt of the existence or of the importance of the law itself. Mr. Darwin illustrates it thus: "Claim kindred there, and have our claim allowed," "There is no exception to the rule that every -only we shall ask leave to scrutinize care-organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon fully every step of the argument which has be covered by the offspring of a single pair. such an ending, and demur if at any point Linnæus has calculated that if an annual plant of it we are invited to substitute unlimited produced only two seeds-and there is no plant so unproductive as this—and their seedlings next hypothesis for patient observation, or the year produced two, and so on, then in twenty spasmodic fluttering flight of fancy for the years there would be a million plants. The elsevere conclusions to which logical accuracy ephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all of reasoning has led the way. known animals, and I have taken some pains to increase. It will be under the mark to assume estimate its probable minimum rate of natural that it breeds when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth three pair of young in this interval; if this be so, at the end of the fifth century there would be alive fifteen million elephants, descended from the first pair.”—P. 64. Now, the main propositions by which Mr. Darwin's conclusion is attained are these: "1. That observed and admitted variations spring up in the course of descents from a common progenitor. "2. That many of these variations tend to an improvement upon the parent stock. "3. That, by a continued selection of these improved specimens as the progenitors of future stock, its powers may be unlimitedly increased. "4. And, lastly, that there is in nature a power continually and universally working out this selection, and so fixing and augmenting these improvements." Mr. Darwin's whole theory rests upon the truth of these propositions, and crumbles utterly away if only one of them fail him. These therefore we must closely scrutinize. We will begin with the last in our series, both because we think it the newest and the most ingenious part of Mr. Darwin's whole argument, and also because, whilst we absolutely deny the mode in which he seeks to apply the existence of the power to help him in his argument, yet we think that he throws great and very interesting light upon the fact that such a self-acting power does actively and continuously work in all creation around us. Leaving theoretical calculations, Mr. Darwin proceeds to facts to establish this rapid increase : "Several of the plants, such as the cardoon, and a tall thistle, now most numerous over the wide plains of La Plata, clothing square leagues of surface almost to the exclusion of all other plants, have been introduced from Europe."P. 65. And, again, he reasons from the animal world: "The condor lays a couple of eggs and the ostrich a score, condor may be the more numerous of the two. and yet in the same country the The fulmar petrel lays but one egg, yet it is believed to be the most numerous bird in the world."-P. 66. This is followed by a passage which well illustrates the care and cleverness of Mr. Darwin's own observations :: "On a piece of ground three feet long and two wide, dug and cleaned, and where there could be no choking from other plants, I marked all the seedlings of our native weeds as they came up, and, out of the three hundred and fifty- tition has in nature to deal with such favorseven, no less than two hundred and ninety-five able variations in the individuals of any spewere destroyed, chiefly by slugs and insects. If cies, as truly to exalt those individuals above turf which has long been mown-and the case would be the same with turf closely browsed by quadrupeds-be let to grow, the more vigorous plants gradually kill the less vigorous though fully grown plants; thus out of twenty species growing on a little plot of turf (three feet by four) nine species perished from the other species being allowed to grow up freely."—Pp. 67, 68. Now all this is excellent. The facts are all gathered from a true observation of nature, and from a patiently obtained comprehension of their undoubted and unquestionable relative significance. That such a struggle for life then actually exists, and that it tends continually to lead the strong to exterminate the weak, we readily admit; and in this law we see a merciful provision against the deterioration, in a world apt to deteriorate, of the works of the Creator's hands. Thus it is that the bloody strifes of the males of all wild animals tend to maintain the vigor and full development of their race; because, through this machinery of appetite and passion, the most vigorous individuals become the progenitors of the next generation of the tribe. And this law, which thus maintains through the struggle of individuals the high type of the family, tends continually, through a similar struggle of species, to lead the stronger species to supplant the weaker. This, indeed, is no new observation: Lucretius knew and eloquently expatiated on its truth : "Multaque tum interiisse animantum secla ne cesse est, Nec potuisse propagando procudere prolem. Nam, quæcumque vides vesci vitalibus auris Aut dolus, aut virtus, aut denique mobilitas, est, Ex ineunte ævo, genus id tutata reservant."* And this, which is true in animal, is no less true in vegetable life. Hardier or more prolific plants, or plants better suited to the soil or conditions of climate, continually tend to supplant others less hardy, less prolific, or less suited to the conditions of vegetable life in those special districts. Thus far, then, the action of such a law as this is clear and indisputable. But before we can go a step further, and argue from its operation in favor of a perpetual improvement in natural types, we must be shown first that this law of compe* Lucret., "De Rer. Nat.," lib. v. the highest type of perfection to which their least imperfect predecessors attained-above, that is to say, the normal level of the species:-that such individual improvement is, in truth, a rising above the highest level of any former tide, and not merely the return in its appointed season of the feebler neap to the fuller spring-tide;—and then, next, we must be shown that there is actively at work in nature, co-ordinate with the law of competition and with the existence of such favorable variations, a power of accumulating such favorable variation through successive descents. Failing the establishment of either of these last two propositions, Mr. Darwin's whole theory falls to pieces. He has accordingly labored with all his strength to establish these, and into that attempt we must now follow him. Mr. Darwin begins by endeavoring to prove that such variations are produced under the selecting power of man amongst domestic animals. Now here we demur in limine. Mr. Darwin himself allows that there is a plastic habit amongst domesticated animals which is not found amongst them when in a state of nature. "Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organization becomes in some degree plastic."” (P. 80.) If so, it is not fair to argue, from the variations of the plastic nature, as to what he himself admits is the far more rigid nature of the undomesticated animal. But we are ready to give Mr. Darwin this point, and to join issue with him on the variations which he is able to adduce, as having been produced under circumstances the most favorable to change. He takes for this purpose the domestic pigeon, the most favorable specimen no doubt, for many reasons, which he could select, as being a race eminently subject to variation, the variations of which have been most carefully observed by breeders, and which, having been for some four thousand years domesticated, affords the longest possible period for the accumulation of variations. But with all this in his favor, what is he able to show? He writes a delightful chapter upon pigeons. Runts and fantails, short-faced tumblers and long-faced tumblers, long-beaked carriers and pouters, black barbs, jacobins, and tur us. bits, coo and tumble, inflate their œsophagi, variations into well-marked species, but to and pout and spread out their tails before a return from the abnormal to the original We learn that "pigeons have been type. So clear is this, that it is well known watched and tended with the utmost care, that any relaxation in the breeder's care efand loved by many people." They have faces all the established points of difference, been domesticated for thousands of years in and the fancy-pigeon reverts again to the several quarters of the world. The earliest character of its simplest ancestor. known record of pigeons is in the fifth Egyptian dynasty, about three thousand years B.C., though "pigeons are given in a bill of fare" (what an autograph would be that of the chef-de-cuisine of the day!) "in the previous dynasty" (pp. 27, 28): and so we follow pigeons on down to the days of "that most skilful breeder Sir John Sebright," who "used to say, with respect to pigeons, that he would produce any given feather in three years, but it would take him six years to produce beak and head.'"-P. 31. The same relapse may moreover be traced in still wider instances. There are many testimonies to the fact that domesticated animals, removed from the care and tending of man, lose rapidly the peculiar variations which domestication had introduced amongst them, and relapse into their old untamed condition. "Plus," says M. P. S. Pallas,* "je réfléchis, plus je suis disposé à croire que la race des chevaux sauvages que l'on trouve dans les landes baignées par le Jaik et le Don, et dans celles de Baraba, ne proNow all this is very pleasant writing, es- vient que de chevaux Kirguis et Kalmouks pecially for pigeon-fanciers; but what step devenus sauvages," etc.; and he proceeds to do we really gain in it at all towards estab- show how far they have relapsed from the lishing the alleged fact that variations are type of tame into that of wild horses. Prichbut species in the act of formation, or in es-ard, in his "Natural History of Man," retablishing Mr. Darwin's position that a well- marks that the present state of the escaped marked variety may be called an incipient domesticated animals, which, since the disspecies? We affirm positively that no single covery of the Western Continent by the Spanfact tending even in that direction is brought | iards, have been transported from Europe to forward. On the contrary, every one points America, gives us an opportunity of seeing distinctly towards the opposite conclusion; how soon the relapse may become almost for with all the change wrought in appear-complete. "Many of these races have mulance, with all the apparent variation in man- tiplied (he says) exceedingly on a soil and ners, there is not the faintest beginning of under a climate congenial to their nature. any such change in what that great compar- Several of them have run wild in the vast ative anatomist, Professor Owen, calls "the forests of America, and have lost all the characteristics of the skeleton or other parts most obvious appearances of domestication."† of the frame upon which specific differences This he proceeds to prove to be more or less are founded." There is no tendency to the case as to the hog, the horse, the ass, that great law of sterility which, in spite of the sheep, the goat, the cow, the dog, the Mr. Darwin, we affirm ever to mark the hy-cat, and gallinaceous fowls. plastic habit which is the result of long domestication; and that result is, to prove that there has been no commencement of any such mutation as could, if it was infinitely prolonged, become really a specific change. brid; for every variety of pigeon, and the Now, in all these instances we have the descendants of every such mixture, breed as result of the power of selection exercised on freely, and with as great fertility, as the origi- the most favorable species for a very long nal pair; nor is there the very first appear-period of time, in a race of that peculiarly ance of that power of accumulating variations until they grow into specific differences, which is essential to the argument for the transmutation of species; for as Mr. Darwin allows, sudden returns in color, and other most altered appearances, to the parent stock continually attest the tendency of variations not to become fixed, but to vanish, and manifest the perpetual presence of a principle leading not to the accumulation of minute "On the Classification of Mammalia," p. 98. There is another race of animals which comes under our closest inspection, which has been the friend and companion of man *"Voyages de M. P. S. Pallas, traduit de l'Allemand par M. Gaultier de la Peyronne," vol. i. p. 89. ↑ "Natural History of Man," pp. 27, 28. |