That there are other factors of evolution not yet discovered is almost inevitable; they, however, will be but added ‘laws;’ supplementary and co-ordinated methods—giving greater completeness to our knowledge of the origin of species. But having reached this conclusion, we are at once compelled to ask, What is the origin of this unceasing continuity of variation in all living things? this power to become constantly adapted to change of environment, and for ever, in the fittest form, to survive? Is not this palpably a creative method? Is it not the emergence in time and history of the thought and will of the Creative Power in the beginning?—one of the processes that lay enfolded in the very purpose of the production of heaven and earth, and which as a prevised method only awaited ‘the fulness of time’ to come inevitably into play? The earth, as is well known, and we have already pointed out, is constantly subject to minute, as well as to smaller cyclic and great secular, changes. Nothing but an ability to become adapted through all duration to current and recurrent changes, could have made a continuity of the living population of the globe possible. We have found the principal ‘law’ of those adaptive changes. But because we have learned the nature of the law or method, by which throughout all time, these changes have been brought about; and because the method _appears_ self-acting like the balance wheel of a chronometer, must we argue that there is no design either in the method or its results? That will not satisfy the constant demands of reason. Finding the law according to which a projectile moves, must not be confounded with the cause of its motion. ‘Natural selection’ cannot originate anything. Variation does not explain itself. Why is it a property of all living things to vary indefinitely and in all directions? The Darwinian law has no existence without it; but that ‘law’ no more accounts for this tendency, than the law of falling bodies explains gravitation, or shows why it acts as it does. It is easy to explain the law of the compensations of a chronometer balance, or a compensating clock pendulum; but that does not account for their existence. The law of ‘inheritance,’ the likeness of progeny to parents, is, like the law of variation, universal. But why is it so? If it were not so, there could be no survival of the fittest. Yet it is no more explained by the discovery of that law, than the nature of that which thinks, is explained by a discovery of the laws of thought. Selection implies alternatives to select from. The splendid organic mechanism of all the animals of the earth, with their perfect relations to their sphere, could as a whole, only have been brought about by means that started for, and led to, that goal. ‘The law by which structures originate is one thing; those by which they are restricted, directed, or destroyed is another.’[34] [Footnote 34: _Origin of the Fittest_, by E. D. Cope, p. 225.]