Organized beings then have absolutely no relation to inorganic nature:  a plant does not depend on soil or sunshine, climate, depth in the ocean, height above it; the quantity of saline matters in water have no influence upon animal life; the substitution of carbonic acid for oxygen in our atmosphere would hurt nobody!  That these are absurdities no one should know better than M. Flourens; but they are logical deductions from the assertion just quoted, and from the further statement that natural selection means only that “organization chooses and selects organization.”

For if it be once admitted (what no sane man denies) that the chances of life of any given organism are increased by certain conditions (A) and diminished by their opposites (B), then it is mathematically certain that any change of conditions in the direction of (A) will exercise a selective influence in favour of that organism, tending to its increase and multiplication, while any change in the direction of (B) will exercise a selective influence against that organism, tending to its decrease and extinction.

Or, on the other hand, conditions remaining the same, let a given organism vary (and no one doubts that they do vary) in two directions:  into one form (a) better fitted to cope with these conditions than the original stock, and a second (b) less well adapted to them.  Then it is no less certain that the conditions in question must exercise a selective influence in favour of (a) and against (b), so that (a) will tend to predominance, and (b) to extirpation.

That M. Flourens should be unable to perceive the logical necessity of these simple arguments, which lie at the foundation of all Mr. Darwin’s reasoning; that he should confound an irrefragable deduction from the observed relations of organisms to the conditions which lie around them, with a metaphysical “forme substantielle,” or a chimerical personification of the powers of Nature, would be incredible, were it not that other passages of his work leave no room for doubt upon the subject.

     “On imagine une election naturelle que, pour plus de menagement,
     on me dit etre inconsciente, sans s’apercevoir que le contre-sens
     litteral est precisement la:  election inconsciente.” (P. 52.)

“J’ai deja dit ce qu’il faut penser de l’election naturelle.  Ou l’election naturelle n’est rien, ou c’est la nature:  mais la nature douee d’election, mais la nature personnifiee:  derniere erreur du dernier siecle:  Le xix^e ne fait plus de personnifications.” (P. 53.)

M. Flourens cannot imagine an unconscious selection—­it is for him a contradiction in terms.  Did M. Flourens ever visit one of the prettiest watering-places of “la belle France,” the Baie d’Arcachon?  If so, he will probably have passed through the district of the Landes, and will have had an opportunity of observing the formation of “dunes” on a