It is a very general popular belief at the present day that the Darwinian theory is simply no more than a capricious and anti-theological assertion that mankind are the modified descendants of ape-like ancestors. Though most of my readers, I do not doubt, know how imperfect and erroneous a conception this is, yet I shall not, I think, be wasting time in stating what the Darwinian theory really is. In fact, it is so continuously misrepresented and misunderstood, that no opportunity should be lost of calling attention to its real character. Bit by bit, naturalists had succeeded in discovering the order of nature—so far that all the great facts of the universe, the constitution and movements of the heavenly bodies, the form of our earth, and all the peculiarities of its crust, had been successfully assigned to one set of causes—_the properties of matter_, which are set forth in what we know by the name of the “laws of physics and chemistry.” Whilst geologists, led by Lyell, had shown that the strata of the earth’s crust and its mountains, rivers, and seas were due to the long-continued operation of the very same general causes—the physico-chemical causes—which at this moment are in operation and are continuing their work of change, yet the living matter on the crust of the earth had to be excluded from the grand uniformity which was elsewhere complete. The first hypothesis, then, which was present to Mr. Darwin’s mind, as it had been to that of other earlier naturalists, was this: “Have not all the varieties or species of living things (man, of course, included) been produced by the continuous operation of the _same_ set of physico-chemical causes which alone we can discover, and which alone have been proved sufficient to produce everything else?” “If this be so,” Mr. Darwin must have argued (and here it was that he boldly stepped beyond the speculations of Lamarck and adopted the method by which Lyell had triumphantly established Geology as a science), “these causes must still be able to produce new forms, and are doing so wherever they have opportunity.” He had accordingly to bring the matter to the test of observation by seeking for some case of the production of new forms of plants, or of animals, by natural causes at the present day. Such cases he found in the production of new forms or varieties of plants and animals, by breeders. Breeders (the persons who make it their business to produce new varieties of flowers, of pigeons, of sheep, or what not) make use of two fundamental properties of living things in order to accomplish their purpose. These two properties are, firstly, that no two animals or plants, even when born of the same parents, are _exactly_ alike; this is known as Variation: secondly, that an organism, as a rule, inherits, that is to say, is born with the peculiarities of its parents; this is known as Transmission, and is simply dependent on the fact that