CHAPTER XVI.

RESULT.

LOOKING back on what lies behind us, we may now draw all, summarisingly, to a close.

It may, perhaps, occur to reflect here, that, let us but take up the book itself, the Origin of Mr. Darwin, and read, it is almost only with a shock that we can look back. With the Origin in our hand, and having just read, when we do look back, "That cannot be right," we say to ourselves; "why, just read how it all goes on! and have we the presumption to oppugn a credence that is still, at least so far, in very general repute?"

But, at check thus, and continuing to think, we may by and by remind ourselves of much that, more and more, brings with it the heartening of reassurance.

There is the plan (p. 152) with which we set out, for example, and the salient consideration in regard to it that the complaint of Mr. Darwin (ii. 313), with reference to" Classification, Geological Succession, Homologies, Embryology, and Rudimentary Organs," etc., if it lies against his Reviewers, lies quite as strongly against ourselves; but so, nevertheless, that the plan itself, perhaps, remains unaffected. It is not evolution as evolution, namely, that we have it in hand directly to canvass, but solely the special and peculiar device by which Mr. Darwin, if there is evolution, would accom

plish evolution-realise evolution.

Of evolution itself,

so far as depends on these "Homologies," etc., we do not for a moment deny that the compilation, which, with a running text of arguing and arguing, the Origin alone is, has significantly added to the evidence. But these homologies and the rest we hold ourselves dispensed from the consideration of, simply in view of the fact that they were a material common to all the evolutionary theories, and never on the whole denied even by the creationary ones. This, too, by the example of Mr. Darwin himself, who, in seeking preliminarily to persuade the three or four accepted and established authorities on whom his success was to depend, only named to them, as it were in passing, said homologies, embryologies, etc., and confined himself further to the single device, natural selection, by which it was his belief that the process, as though by an agency at work, could satisfactorily be brought to its accomplishment. We were the more emboldened, too, to the exclusion in question by the conclusions of Mr. Huxley that Mr. Darwin, in regard to the five requisites, "Classification," etc., could claim for himself the authority of a worker at first hand in no more than one of them, Geology. These conclusions of Mr. Huxley's will be found fully discussed at pp. 179-181, where what relates to "physical geography” and "paleontology" need not prove a difficulty.

So far of the material excluded; but, as in looking back it may also occur to us now to reflect, the question of authority being in view, Mr. Huxley's position is no very fixed or determinate one even for the single consideration that has been left us the mere process, namely. It is (ii. 197) "a matter of indifference" to him whether the Darwinian doctrine shall "prove to be final or not;" to Mr. Darwin's discomfort (as more than once indirectly in evidence), he stickles for the infertility of hybrids all

through; he admits generalisations still to fail, and laments the defect as yet of a crucial experiment in breeding (ii. 199, 198).

All the other experts (p. 177), as is also to be recollected here, whose authority would be critical on the question, have, with the single exception of Sir Joseph Hooker, been proved to be even more equivocal in their Darwinianism than Mr. Huxley. It is very emphatically so with Sir Charles Lyell as the expert in chief. With Asa Gray it can hardly be said to be otherwise. Carpenter need not be named; and Wallace urges exceptions, and so expresses himself, that he certainly cannot be called a Darwinian within the strictness of the letter. It is remarkable, too, that he speaks of "varieties" (see p. 182), and not of variations. Nay, again to refer to him so, it is not certain that in this respect Mr. Huxley himself is not similarly minded. Perhaps, after all, it was not carelessness" (p. 186) that led Mr. Huxley to speak of Mr. Darwin's variations as though they were at once "variations from their specific type "-perhaps neither Mr. Huxley nor Mr. Wallace fairly realised that Mr. Darwin's initial variation is only that of the child from the parent (see p. 270), or that (p. 271) he perpetually emphasised the smallness, slightness, triflingness, casualty of the individual difference or variation that was to him a determinant one-the bird with the beak, the seals, the bats, the insects, the elephant with its tusks, the bear, the whale, etc.

Nor can we feel quite sure that we ought to exonerate Mr. Darwin himself from all blame here. It is only through long, patient looking that the particular moments in the theory have reached the clearness. which we should be glad to think they will be found to possess in these pages. Mr. Darwin but too often widens and weakens his expression into a vagueness and

indefiniteness of superfluous phrase precisely then when it is that vagueness and indefiniteness should be expressly eschewed. Divergence, natural selection, appear for the most part, perhaps, only in a mist of general terms, with never a moment, and never a connection of moment with moment, prescinded. An expression or two, extemporaneously occurring here and there in letters to Lyell, will pretty certainly do more to crystallise the particular theory than all the four hundred and odd closely-printed pages of the sixth edition of the Origin.

In regard to Divergence, for example, take this sentence, which is meant to go precisely to the centre of what is concerned and make all clear even to his children (i. 84): "The solution, as I believe, is that the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature" (or see in the Origin the whole theme formally discussed at pp. 86 sqq.). When we understand that this means only that a stock of horses may "split up into race-horses, dray-horses," etc., we look back with astonishment at that so gratuitous and misleading phraseological bigness. I say misleading; for it is in every way misleading. It is misleading for the reader, who remains not without perplexity, it may be, as to how or what they are these dominant and increasing forms in the economy of nature. It is misleading for Mr. Darwin himself, who, quitting the definitely seen for the indefinite and unseen, is tempted to call upon the ingenuity of his imagination for the transference of a relation domestically with horses at home to a lair in the jungle wildly with the fera abroad. "Take the case of a carnivorous quadruped," he says, "it can succeed in increasing only by its varying descendants seizing on places at present occupied by other animals: some of them, for instance, being enabled to feed on new kinds of

prey, either dead or alive; some inhabiting new stations, climbing trees, frequenting waters, and some, perhaps, becoming less carnivorous!" Now all that is simply, as Carlyle might have said, wind; there is not an atom of ascertained fact in it; it is merely a promissory note on a security in the clouds; it is only Mr. Darwin in a haze of idle speculation, of which such a man as he was ought to have been ashamed-especially considering the gravity of all that was involved.

But, as regards Natural Selection in the same reference (expression namely), it will be sufficient to direct attention back to the preface. There Mr. Darwin is seen to have been at times in consternation, as it were, before the impossibility of his getting people to know what he meant specially what he meant by natural selection. He was apt to "demur" when such experts as Lyell and Hooker would put his theories into their own words. "Even able men," he exclaims, "cannot understand at what I am driving." Will it be thought impertinence on our part if we venture to suggest here, besides the language, the thing itself that was wrapped up in it? People could not see this thing itself, not for its complexity but for its simplicity. For the theory that was to be understood to explain such marvels, they looked up to the skies or away to the infinite; it never for a moment dawned upon them that it could be that so common, everyday thing that lay at their feet. Oh no! No, never! That could not be all that was meant to be understood. Do you mean to insinuate that, because of such ordinary, trifling variations in organisms, plant or animal, as we casually, from day to day, see-the Tooth of an inch of additional length to the beak of a bird, sayonly supposititiously assumed to accumulate, and that only in a supposititiously assumed infinitude of time,—do you mean to insinuate that it is on that, this whole