MR. BELLOC’S MENTAL INDIGESTION I fancy this stuff he has written here is an outcome of an indigestion of Samuel Butler by Mr. Belloc. I should not have thought Mr. Belloc had read Samuel Butler, and I doubt if he has read him much. But there is a decided echo of _Luck or Cunning_ in the one indistinct paragraph in which, without committing himself too deeply, Mr. Belloc seems to convey his own attitude towards the procedure of Evolution. “Design,” whatever that is, is at work, and Natural Selection is not. “There is an innate power possessed by the living thing to attempt its own adaptation.” It is quite a delusion apparently that rabbits that cannot run or sparrows that are not quick on the wing are killed off more frequently than the smarter fellows. That never happens, though to the atheistically minded it may seem to happen. If it happens, it would “get rid of a God.” But there are rabbits which, unlike Mrs. Micawber, do make an effort. You must understand that all creation, inspired by design, is striving. The good fungus says to itself, “Redder and more spots will benefit me greatly,” and tries and tries, and presently there are redder hues and more spots. Or a happily inspired fish says: “There is a lot of food on land and the life is more genteel there, so let me get lungs.” And presently it gets lungs. Some day Mr. Belloc must take a holiday in Sussex and flap about a bit and get himself some wings and demonstrate all this. But perhaps this is caricature, and Mr. Belloc when he talks about that “innate disposition” just means nothing very much--just an attempt or something. I will not pretend to understand Mr. Belloc fully upon this point. MR. BELLOC’S BIRD-LIZARD I will return to the essential misconception of the Theory of Natural Selection betrayed in this first _a priori_ when I consider Mr. Belloc’s third feat of logic. But first let me glance at his second. In this he says, very correctly, that every stage in the evolution of a living creature must be a type capable of maintaining itself and every change must be an advantageous change. I have noted this very obvious point already in my second paper. But then Mr. Belloc instructs us that the chances of its being so are, for no earthly reason, zero--that fatal zero again!--and goes on to a passage so supremely characteristic that it must be read to be believed:-- “A bird has wings with which it can escape its enemies. If it began as a reptile without wings--when, presumably, it had armour or some other aid to survival--what of the interval? Natural Selection sets out to change a reptile’s leg into a bird’s wing and the scales of its armour into feathers. It does so by making the leg less and less of a leg for countless ages, and by infinite minute gradations, gradually turning the scales into feathers.