rts." I permit myself to doubt whether even
the Master of Trinity's well-tried courage--physical, intellectual, and
moral--would have been equal to this feat. No doubt the sudden
concurrence of half-a-ton of inorganic molecules into a live rhinoceros
is conceivable, and therefore may be possible. But does such an event
lie sufficiently within the bounds of probability to justify the belief
in its occurrence on the strength of any attainable, or, indeed,
imaginable, evidence?

In view of the assertion (often repeated in the early days of the
opposition to Darwin) that he had added nothing to Lamarck, it is very
interesting to observe that the possibility of a fifth alternative, in
addition to the four he has stated, has not dawned upon Dr. Whewell's
mind. The suggestion that new species may result from the selective
action of external conditions upon the variations from their specific
type which individuals present--and which we call "spontaneous,"
because we are ignorant of their causation--is as wholly unknown to the
historian of scientific ideas as it was to biological specialists
before 1858. But that suggestion is the central idea of the 'Origin of
Species,' and contains the quintessence of Darwinism.

Thus, looking back into the past, it seems to me that my own position
of critical expectancy was just and reasonable, and must have been
taken up, on the same grounds, by many other persons. If Agassiz told
me that the forms of life which had successively tenanted the globe
were the incarnations of successive thoughts of the Deity; and that he
had wiped out one set of these embodiments by an appalling geological
catastrophe as soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found
myself not only unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from the
facts of paleontology, upon which this astounding hypothesis was
founded, but I had to confess my want of any means of testing the
correctness of his explanation of them. And besides that, I could by
no means see what the explanation explained. Neither did it help me to
be told by an eminent anatomist that species had succeeded one another
in time, in virtue of "a continuously operative creational law." That
seemed to me to be no more than saying that species had succeeded one
another, in the form of a vote-catching resolution, with "law" to
please the man of science, and "creational" to draw the orthodox. So I
took refuge in that "thatige Skepsis" which Goethe ha