"Any supposition that the astronomical cycle has occasioned the physiological one, that the structure of plants has been brought to be what it is by the action of external causes, or that such plants as could not accommodate themselves to the existing day have perished, would be not only an arbitrary and baseless assumption, but, moreover, useless for the purposes of explanation which it professes, as we have noticed of a similar supposition with respect to the annual cycle." Of course these passages in no way make against Mr. Huxley's allusions to Dr. Whewell's writings in proof that, until the publication of the _Origin of Species_, the "main theorem" of this work had not dawned on any other mind, save that of Mr. Wallace. But these passages show, even more emphatically than total silence with regard to the principle of survival could have done, the real distance which at that time separated the minds of thinking men from all that was wrapped up in this principle. For they show that Dr. Whewell, even after he had obtained a glimpse of the principle "as a logical possibility," only saw in it an "arbitrary and baseless assumption." Moreover, the passages show a remarkable juxtaposition of the very terms in which the theory of natural selection was afterwards formulated. Indeed, if we strike out the one word "intentional" (which conveys the preconceived idea of the writer, and thus prevented him from doing justice to any naturalistic view), all the following parts of the above quotations might be supposed to have been written by a Darwinian. "If not by chance, how otherwise could such a coincidence occur, than by an _adjustment_ of these two things to one another; by a _selection_ of such an organization in plants as would _fit_ them to the earth on which they were to grow; by an adaptation of _construction_ to _conditions_; of the _scale_ of construction to the _scale_ of conditions?" Yet he immediately goes on to say: "If the objector were to suppose that plants were originally _fitted_ to years of various lengths, and that such only have _survived_ to the present time ... _as could be accommodated to it_ (i. e. the actual cycle), we should reply that the assumption is too gratuitous and extravagant to require much consideration." Was there ever a more curious exhibition of failure to perceive the importance of a "logical possibility"? And this at the very time when another mind was bestowing twenty years of labour on its "consideration." NOTE B TO PAGE 295. Since these remarks were delivered in my lectures as here printed, Mr. Mivart has alluded to the subject in the following and precisely opposite sense:--