otherwise be devoted to the making of wax,
is devoted to the gathering and storing of honey for winter food. Mr.
Darwin passes from the humble bee with its rude cells, through the
Melipona with its more artistic cells, to the hive-bee with its
astonishing architecture. The bees place themselves at equal
distances apart upon the wax, sweep and excavate equal spheres round
the selected points. The spheres intersect, and the planes of
intersection are built up with thin laminae. Hexagonal cells are thus
formed. This mode of treating such questions is, as I have said,
representative. The expositor habitually retires from the more
perfect and complex, to the less perfect and simple, and carries you
with him through stages of perfecting--adds increment to increment of
infinitesimal change, and in this way gradually breaks down your
reluctance to admit that the exquisite climax of the whole could be a
result of natural selection.

Mr. Darwin shirks no difficulty; and, saturated as the subject was
with his own thought, he must have known, better than his critics, the
weakness as well as the strength of his theory. This of course would
be of little avail were his object a temporary dialectic victory,
instead of the establishment of a truth which he means to be
everlasting. But he takes no pains to disguise the weakness he has
discerned; nay, he takes every pains to bring it into the strongest
light. His vast resources enable him to cope with objections started
by himself and others, so as to leave the final impression upon the
reader's mind that, if they be not completely answered, they certainly
are not fatal. Their negative force being thus destroyed, you are
free to be influenced by the vast positive mass of evidence he is able
to bring before you. This largeness of knowledge, and readiness of
resource, render Mr. Darwin the most terrible of antagonists.
Accomplished naturalists have levelled heavy and sustained criticisms
against him--not always with the view of fairly weighing his theory,
but with the express intention of exposing its weak points only. This
does not irritate him. He treats every objection with a soberness and
thoroughness which even Bishop Butler might be proud to imitate,
surrounding each fact with its appropriate detail, placing it in its
proper relations, and usually giving it a significance which, as long
as it was kept isolated, failed to appear. This is done without a
trace of ill-temp