in the lives and development of these creatures, connected and increasing with an advancing animal evolution, but still only a term to express the modifying influences incidental to a struggle for existence.[1] In fact, natural selection is more an effect than a cause. It was incidental and consequent to the progress of evolution in animal life, and ever increasing its sway in ratio with the vast increase of living things became the giant modifying influence, and modelled, painted, exterminated, and sustained the fauna and flora which by their dangerous fecundity came under her rule. But because a phenomenon is ancient it is not necessarily eternal—theologians discuss those questions—and if logic imperatively demands an antecedent to natural selection, biology must refuse to recognize that undoubtedly mighty and modifying influence as a First Cause.[2] "We attach too exclusive an importance to adaptation... when we think to explain by selection every similarity between the colouring of an animal and that of the ground on which it lives. For, as we have seen, animals may become similar in colour to their surroundings, actually adapted in colour, quite by chance; for instance, in consequence of the direct necessary action of light, i.e. of the surrounding colours, and therefore without selection, many really wonderful cases of adaptation, apparently due to selection, probably come under the category."[3]
It seems a probable suggestion that assimilative colouration was a very constant factor in an early stage of animal life, and
- ↑ To understand the philosophical conceptions in Biology previous to the Darwinian epoch, which may be said to have commenced with the publication of the 'Origin of Species' in 1859, we may with the greatest instruction reperuse the 'Essay on Classification,' written by that master naturalist, Agassiz, the preface of which bears date 1858, the same year that simultaneous papers by Darwin and Wallace were read before the Linnean Society, and the way made straight for the theory of natural selection. In the essay of Agassiz only three references are made to Darwin, and those purely bibliographical, recording more or less technical memoirs. In a philosophic sense the 'Essay on Classification' may be described as the last charge of the Old Guard.
- ↑ It will be remembered that Mr. Mivart has brilliantly advanced his thesis that "species have been evolved by ordinary natural laws (for the most part unknown) aided by the subordinate action of 'natural selection'" ('Genesis of Species,' p. 333).
- ↑ Eimer, 'Organic Evolution,' Eng. transl. p. 144.
