Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/403

Rh is spoken of, variation is always implied. But I entirely agree with your and Hooker's remark.

Have you begun regularly to write your book on the antiquity of man?

I do not agree with your remark that I make Natural Selection do too much work. You will perhaps reply that every man rides his hobby-horse to death; and that I am in the galloping state.

I am pleased that you approve of Hutton's review. It seemed to me to take a more philosophical view of the manner of judging the question than any other review. The sentence you quote from it seems very true, but I do not agree with the theological conclusion. I think he quotes from Asa Gray, certainly not from me; but I have neither A. Gray nor Origin with me. Indeed, I have over and over again said in the Origin that Natural Selection does nothing without variability; I have given a whole chapter on laws, and used the strongest language how ignorant we are on these laws. But I agree that I have somehow (Hooker says it is owing to my title) not made the great and manifest importance of previous variability plain enough. Breeders constantly speak of Selection as the one great means of improvement; but of course they imply individual differences, and this I should have thought would have been obvious to all in Natural Selection; but it has not been so.

I have just said that I cannot agree with 'which variations are the effects of an unknown law, ordained and guided without doubt by an intelligent cause on a preconceived and definite plan.' Will you honestly tell me (and I should be really much obliged) whether you believe that the shape of my nose (eheu!) was ordained and 'guided by an intelligent cause?' By the selection of analogous and less differences fanciers make almost generic differences in their pigeons; and can you see any good reason why the Natural Selection of analogous individual differences should not make new species? If you say that God ordained that at some time and place a dozen slight variations should arise, and that one of them alone should be preserved in the struggle for life and the other eleven should perish in the first or few first generations, then the saying seems to me mere verbiage. It comes to merely saying that everything that is, is ordained.

Let me add another sentence. Why should you or I speak of variation as having been ordained and guided, more than does an astronomer, in discussing the fall of a meteoric stone? He would simply say that it was drawn to our earth by the attraction of gravity,