Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/418

386 subject to many conditions, of which at present we know as little of one as the other. This phenomenon may be seen in many ways, quite independent of environmental conditions. Plants would certainly be thought to flower in response to the climatic conditions of the year; yet Kerner observed the earliest date of flowering of a number of willows growing in the Botanic Garden at Innsbruck for a period of twelve years, and thus not only arrived at an average date for the first opening of the male flowers in some fifty different kinds of Salix, but, as he remarks:—"It will be observed that the two alpine willows, Salix retusa and S. jacquiniana, flowered on an average in the twelve years on the same day, and that their hybrid, S. retusoides, kept also to that date." Again, every angler knows—at least everyone of experience and observation—that, as the Countess of Malmesbury has expressed it, "each river has certain hours during which the fish rise in preference to any other." But the "law" of natural selection had as much a beginning in time, and in biological time, as the "moral law"—practised in some form or another by the greater part of mankind—must have been unknown to our more bestial ancestors; little understood by prehistoric man, and only fully developed as human civilization and slavery advanced hand in hand, through peace and plenty, through misery and despair. In fact, the term "natural law" is as loose and ill-defined as that of "moral law." All that we see, all that we can reduce to rational conception, are natural phenomena, different or more evolved to-day than what little we know of them in the past; while that scanty record represents merely an appreciation of a form of evolution which took place in time estimated only by theoretical calculation, and under conditions of which we practically know nothing. We see sequences of natural phenomena, which we call natural laws, and we can no more realize the antecedents of these phenomena than we can conceive an era when our so-called natural laws were neither existent, necessary, nor consequent. We are thus compelled to seek a time prior to or independent of natural selection, or else logically to apply it