bserve the interests of
animal-life without at the same time subserving those of the plant-life
itself, then the fact makes wholly in favour of the naturalistic
explanation of such ministration as appears. If any plants had presented
any characters pointing prospectively to needs of animals without
primarily ministering to their own, then, indeed, there would have been
no room for the theory of natural selection. But as this can nowhere be
alleged, the theory of natural selection finds all the facts to be
exactly as it requires them to be: such ministration as plants yield to
animals becomes so much evidence of natural selection having slowly
formed the animals to appropriate the nutrition which the plants had
previously gathered--and gathered under the previous influence of
natural selection acting on themselves entirely for their own sakes.
Therefore I say it is painfully manifest that "the enchainment of all
the various orders of creatures in a hierarchy of activities," is _not_
"in harmony with what we might expect to find in a world the outcome of
a First Cause possessed of intelligence and [beneficent] will." So far
as any argument from such "enchainment" reaches, it makes entirely
against the view which Mr. Mivart is advocating. In point of fact, there
is a total absence of any such "ministration" by one "order of
creatures" to the needs of any other order, as the beneficent design
theory would necessarily expect; while such ministration as actually
does obtain is exactly and universally the kind which the naturalistic
theory requires.

Again, quite independently, and still more recently, Mr. Mivart alluded
in _Nature_ (vol. xli, p. 41) to the difficulty which the apparently
exceptional case of gall-formation presents to the theory of natural
selection. Therefore I supplied (vol. xli, p. 80) the suggestion given
in the text, viz. that although it appears impossible that the sometimes
remarkably elaborate and adaptive structures of galls can be due to
natural selection acting directly on the plants themselves--seeing that
the adaptation has reference to the needs of their parasites--it is
quite possible that the phenomena may be due to natural selection acting
indirectly on the plants, by always preserving those individual insects
(and larvae) the character of whose secretions is such as will best
induce the particular shapes of galls that are required. Several other
correspondents took part in the discussion, and