h; even about Tyndall. It is a gain that so wonderful a man,
though no naturalist, should become a convert to evolution; Huxley, it
seems, remarked in his speech to this effect. I should like to know what
he means about design,--I cannot in the least understand, for I presume
he does not believe in special interpositions. (243/2. See "British
Association Report," page cv. Lord Kelvin speaks very doubtfully of
evolution. After quoting the concluding passage of the "Origin," he goes
on, "I have omitted two sentences...describing briefly the hypothesis of
'the origin of species by Natural Selection,' because I have always felt
that this hypothesis does not contain the true theory of evolution,
IF EVOLUTION THERE HAS BEEN in biology" (the italics are not in
the original). Lord Kelvin then describes as a "most valuable and
instructive criticism," Sir John Herschel's remark that the doctrine of
Natural Selection is "too like the Laputan method of making books, and
that it did not sufficiently take into account a continually guiding and
controlling intelligence." But it should be remembered that it was
in this address of Lord Kelvin's that he suggested the possibility of
"seed-bearing meteoric stones moving about through space" inoculating
the earth with living organisms; and if he assumes that the whole
population of the globe is to be traced back to these "moss-grown
fragments from the ruins of another world," it is obvious that he
believes in a form of evolution, and one in which a controlling
intelligence is not very obvious, at all events not in the initial and
all-important stage.) Herschel's was a good sneer. It made me put in the
simile about Raphael's Madonna, when describing in the "Descent of Man"
the manner of formation of the wondrous ball-and-socket ornaments, and I
will swear to the truth of this case. (243/3. See "Descent of Man,"
II., page 141. Darwin says that no one will attribute the shading of the
"eyes" on the wings of the Argus pheasant to the "fortuitous concourse
of atoms of colouring-matter." He goes on to say that the development of
the ball-and-socket effect by means of Natural Selection seems at first
as incredible as that "one of Raphael's Madonnas should have been formed
by the selection of chance daubs of paint." The remark of Herschel's,
quoted in "Life and Letters," II., page 241, that the "Origin"
illustrates the "law of higgledy-piggledy," is probably a conversational
variant of the Laputan co