< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu
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108

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

We can not admit that anything deducible from such premises can have any application in the case before us. What we are here concerned to determine is the effect of the operation of the laws of nature in the state of nature; and this can not be affected by anything that could be achieved in a state in which those laws are superseded by un-natural restraints. The conditions of existence in a state of domestication, whereinsoever they differ from those in the state of nature, are by their very definition peculiar to the state of which they are predicated, and consequently out of place in an argument that concerns the ages which preceded the advent and dominion of man. Granted the very utmost that is sought to be established by such means, even to the extent of the actual production of a new species—and nothing of this kind is pretended to—it would leave the question of development by evolution (in the abstract) wholly untouched."

Whether or not this passage has been written after a perusal of the "Variation," it displays an inability to appreciate the function of experiment that to most persons will appear, and rightly appear, lamentable. Comment on so astonishing a passage would be useless, for nothing that I could say could throw its condensed absurdity into any stronger relief. As well might it be said that all our study of electricity is useless for the purpose of furthering our knowledge of natural forces, except so far as observations on the subject are confined to the phenomena of lightning.

Next in order we come upon the writer's estimate of the argument from classification:

The validity of this argument [he says] disappears altogether in view of the fact that just the same state of things would be practicable in the case of a creation according to the vulgar hypothesis of an exercise of the divine power. Considering the mass of animal life to be dealt with, amounting, as just observed, to 120,000 different species, it is almost of necessity that they should be formed upon one or more types or models, implying a certain uniformity of character among the members of the same typical construction, which it is not unreasonable to suppose intended to be evidenced in those animals that were apparently least amenable to it, by the otherwise inexplicable indications of imperfectly developed organs.

Disregarding the error that it is not only in such animals that rudimentary organs are present—seeing that, on the contrary, their occurrence is so general that almost every species presents one or more of them—the idea which is conveyed by this passage is one of the wildest attempts at criticism that I have ever encountered. The instances of affinities in the animal and vegetable kingdoms would, if they could be enumerated, run up into the thousand millions, and extend to the most complex and delicate traits of structure that it is possible to imagine. That such a state of things may be due to intelligent design is a sufficiently reasonable hypothesis, and as such may be properly opposed to the hypothesis of hereditary descent. But the supposition that such a state of things can be due to any "necessity"

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