earthly tabernacle is concerned, to those in which the lower animals ever remain.  At that point of being the development of the protozoa is arrested.  Through it the embryo of their chief passes to the perfection of his earthly frame.  But the types of those lower forms of being must be found in the animals which never advance beyond them—­not in man for whom they are but the foundation for an after-development; whilst he too, Creation’s crown and perfection, thus bears witness in his own frame to the law of order which pervades the universe.

In like manner could we answer every other question as to which Mr. Darwin thinks all oracles are dumb unless they speak his speculation.  He is, for instance, more than once troubled by what he considers imperfections in Nature’s work.  “If,” he says, “our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable contrivances in Nature, this same reason tells us that some other contrivances are less perfect.”

Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our idea of fitness.  We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and with the great majority slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen-bee for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases.  The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been observed.—­p. 472.

We think that the real temper of this whole speculation as to nature itself may be read in these few lines.  It is a dishonouring view of nature.

That reverence for the work of God’s hands with which a true belief in the All-wise Worker fills the believer’s heart is at the root of all great physical discovery; it is the basis of philosophy.  He who would see the venerable features of Nature must not seek with the rudeness of a licensed roysterer violently to unmask her countenance; but must wait as a learner for her willing unveiling.  There was more of the true temper of philosophy in the poetic fiction of the Pan-ic shriek, than in the atheistic speculations of Lucretius.  But this temper must beset those who do in effect banish God from nature.  And so Mr. Darwin not only finds in it these bungling contrivances which his own greater skill could amend, but he stands aghast before its mightier phenomena.  The presence of death and famine seems to him inconceivable on the ordinary idea of creation; and he looks almost aghast at them until reconciled to their presence by his own theory that “a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms, is decidedly followed by the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals” (p. 490).  But we can give him a simpler solution still for the presence of these strange forms of imperfection and suffering amongst the works of God.