monizes apparently conflicting conceptions.--Summary and conclusion.

Having now severally reviewed the principal biological facts which bear
upon specific manifestation, it remains to sum up the results, and to
endeavour to ascertain what, if anything, can be said _positively_, as well
as negatively, on this deeply interesting question.

In the preceding chapters it has been contended, in the first place, that
no mere survival of the fittest accidental and minute variations can
account for the incipient stages of useful structures, such as, _e.g._, the
heads of flat-fishes, the baleen of whales, vertebrate limbs, the laryngeal
structures of the newborn kangaroo, the pedicellariae of Echinoderms, or for
many of the facts of mimicry, and especially those last touches of mimetic
perfection, where an insect not only mimics a leaf, but one worm-eaten and
attacked by fungi. [Page 221]

Also, that structures like the hood of the cobra and the rattle of the
rattlesnake seem to require another explanation.

Again, it has been contended that instances of colour, as in some apes; of
beauty, as in some shell-fish; and of utility, as in many orchids, are
examples of conditions which are quite beyond the power of Natural
Selection to originate and develop.

Next, the peculiar mode of origin of the eye (by the simultaneous and
concurrent modification of distinct parts), with the wonderful refinement
of the human ear and voice, have been insisted on; as also, that the
importance of all these facts is intensified through the necessity
(admitted by Mr. Darwin) that many individuals should be similarly and
simultaneously modified in order that slightly favourable variations may
hold their own in the struggle for life, against the overwhelming force and
influence of mere number.

Again, we have considered, in the third chapter, the great improbability
that from minute variations in all directions alone and unaided, save by
the survival of the fittest, closely similar structures should
independently arise; though, on a non-Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis,
their development might be expected _a priori_. We have seen, however, that
there are many instances of wonderfully close similarity which are not due
to genetic affinity; the most notable instance, perhaps, being that brought
forward by Mr. Murphy, namely, the appearance of the same eye-structure in
the vertebrate and molluscous sub-kingdoms. A curious resemblance, though
less in