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Show .. 156 JJ.AR WINIANA. seem to be, that a material connection between a series of created things-such as the development of one of them from another, or of all from a common stock-is highly compatible wit~ their .intellectudal dc.onnecdtion, namely with their bemg designed an Irecte by one mi~d. Yet upon some ground which is not explained, and which ·we are unable. to conjectu:·e, ~r. Agassiz concludes to the contrary In the orgamc lnngdoms and insists that, because the members of such a series' have an intellectual connecti.O n, "the y cannot be the result of a material differentiation of the objects themselves," 1 ~hat is, ther cannot have had a genealogical connectiOn. But IS there n~t as much intellectual connection between the successive generations of any species as there is between the . several species of a genus, or the several genera of an order? As the intellectual connection here is realized through the material connection, why may it not be so in the case of species and genera~ On all sides, therefore, the implication seems to be quite the other way. ReturninO' to the accidental element, it is evident that the str~ngest point ~gainst the compatibility of Darwin's hypothesis with design in Nature is made when natural selection is referred to as picking out those variations which are improvements from a vast number which are not improvements, but perhaps the contrary, and therefore useless or purposeles~, and born to perish. But even here the difficulty IS not peculiar; for Nature abounds with analogous instances. Some of our race are useless, or worse, as regards 1 "Contributions to the Natural History . of the United States," vol. i., p. 130; and .American Journal of Science, July, 1860, p. 143. DARWIN AND HIS REVIEWERS. 157 the improvement of mankind ; yet the race may be designed to improve, and may be actually improving. Or, to avoid the complication with free agency-the whole animate life of a country depends absolutely upon the vegetation, the vegetation upon the rain. · The moisture is furnished by the ocean, is raised by the sun's heat from the ocean's surface, and is wafted inland by the winds. But what multitudes of raindrops fall back into the ocean-are as much without a :final cause as the incipient varieties which come to nothing! Does it therefore follow that the rains which are bestowed upon the soil with such rule and average regularity were not designed to support vegetable and animal life ? Consider, likewise, the vast proportion of seeds and pollen, of ova and young-a thousand or more to one-which come to nothing, and are therefore purposeless in the same sense, and only in the same sense, as are Darwin's unimproved and unused slight variations. The world is full of such cases; and these must answer the argument-for we cannot, except by thus showing that it proves too much. Finally, it is worth noticing that, though natural selection is scientifically explicable, variation is not. Thus far the cause of variation, or the reason why the offspring is sometimes unlike the parents, is just as mysterious as the reason why it is generally like the parents. It is now as inexplicable as any other origination; and, if ever explained, the explanation will only carry up the sequence of secondary causes one step farther, and bring us in face of a somewhat different problem, but which will have the same element of |