of Mr.
Darwin's claim, and attributes to him the credit of having elaborated
and sustained it in a way to secure for it universal attention. These
facts are mentioned in order to show the competency of Mr. Wallace as a
witness as to the true character of Darwinism.

Mr. Wallace, in "The Theory of Natural Selection," devotes a chapter to
the consideration of the objections urged by the Duke of Argyll, in his
work on the "Reign of Law," against that theory. Those objections are
principally two: first, that design necessarily implies an intelligent
designer; and second, that beauty not being an advantage to its
possessor in the struggle for life, cannot be accounted for on the
principle of the survival of the fittest. The Duke, he says, maintains
that contrivance and beauty indicate "the constant supervision and
interference of the Creator, and cannot possibly be explained by the
unassisted action of any combination of laws. Now, Mr. Darwin's work,"
he adds, "has for its main object to show that all the phenomena of
living things--all their wonderful organs and complicated structures,
their infinite variety of form, size, and color, their intricate and
involved relations to each other--may have been produced by the action
of a few general laws of the simplest kind, laws which are in most cases
mere statements of admitted facts." (p. 265) Those laws are those with
which we are familiar: Heredity, Variations, Over Production, Struggle
for Life, Survival of the Fittest. "It is probable," he says, "that
these primary facts or laws are but results of the very nature of life,
and of the essential properties of organized and unorganized matter. Mr.
Herbert Spencer, in his 'First Principles' and in his 'Biology,' has, I
think, made us able to understand how this may be; but at present we
may accept these simple laws, without going further back, and the
question then is, Whether the variety, the harmony, the contrivance, and
the beauty we perceive, can have been produced by the action of these
laws alone, or whether we are required to believe in the incessant
interference and direct action of the mind and will of the Creator." (p.
267)[16] Mr. Wallace says, that the Duke of Argyll maintains that God
"has personally applied general laws to produce effects which those laws
are not in themselves capable of producing; that the universe alone with
all its laws intact, would be a sort of chaos, without variety, without
harmony, without d