A third objection to Mr. Darwin’s theory is, that the play of natural contingency in regard to the vicissitudes of conditions, has no title to be named _selection_. Naturalists have long known and spoken of the “influence of accidental causes;” but Mr. Darwin was the first to apply the term _selection_ to the action of these, and thus convert accident into design. The agency to which Mr. Darwin attributes all the changes which he would signalize in animals is really the fortuitous contingency of brute nature; and it is altogether fallacious to call such process, or such non-process, by a term involving foresight and a purpose. We have here, indeed, only a metaphor wholly misapplied. The German writer who, many years ago, said “even the _genera_ are wholly a prey to the changes of the external universal life,” saw precisely what Mr. Darwin sees, but it never struck him to style contingency selection. Yet, how dangerous, how infectious, has not this ungrounded metaphor proved! It has become a _principle_, a _law_, and been transferred by very genuine men into their own sciences of philology and what not. People will wonder at all this by-and-by. But to point out the inapplicability of such a word to the processes of nature referred to by Mr. Darwin, is to point out also the impossibility of any such contingencies proceeding, by graduated rise, from stage to stage, into the great symmetrical organic system—the vast plan—the grand harmonious whole—by which we are surrounded. This rise, this system, is really the objective idea; but it is utterly incapable of being accounted for by any such agency as natural contingency in geological, or infinite, or any time. But it is this which the word selection tends to conceal. We may say, lastly, in objection, here, that, in the fact of “reversion” or “atavism,” Mr. Darwin acknowledges his own failure. We thus see that the species as species is something independent, and holds its own _insita vis naturæ_ within itself. Probably it is not his theory, then, that gives value to Mr. Darwin’s book; nor even his ready ingenuity, whatever interest it may lend: it is the material information it contains. The ingenuity, namely, verges somewhat on that Humian expedient of natural conjecture so copiously exemplified, on occasion of a few trite texts, in Mr. Buckle. But that natural conjecture is always insecure, equivocal, and many-sided. It may be said that ancient warfare, for example, giving victory always to the personally ablest and bravest, must have resulted in the improvement of the race; or that, the weakest being always necessarily left at home, the improvement was balanced by deterioration; or that the ablest were necessarily the most exposed to danger, and so, etc., etc., according, to ingenuity _usque ad infinitum_. Trustworthy conclusion is not possible to this method, but only to the induction of facts, or to scientific demonstration.