CHAPTER XI - SPECIFIC GENESIS

Summary

Having now severally reviewed the principal biological facts which hear upon specific manifestation, it remains to sum up the results, and to endeavour to ascertain what, if anything, can he said positively, as well as negatively, on this deeply interesting question.

In the preceding chapters it has been contended, in the first place, that no mere survival of the fittest accidental and minute variations can account for the incipient stages of useful structures, such as, e.g., the heads of flat-fishes, the baleen of whales, vertebrate limbs, the laryngeal structures of the newborn kangaroo, the pedicellariæ of Echinoderms, or for many of the facts of mimicry, and especially those last touches of mimetic perfection, where an insect not only mimics a leaf, but one worm-eaten and attacked by fungi.

Also, that structures like the hood of the cobra and the rattle of the rattlesnake seem to require another explanation.

Again, it has been contended that instances of colour, as in some apes; of beauty, as in some shell-fish; and of utility, as in many orchids, are examples of conditions which are quite beyond the power of Natural Selection to originate and develop.

Next, the peculiar mode of origin of the eye (by the simultaneous and concurrent modification of distinct parts), with the wonderful refinement of the human ear and voice, have been insisted on; as also, that the importance of all these facts is intensified through the necessity (admitted by Mr. Darwin) that many individuals should be similarly and simultaneously modified in order that slightly favourable variations may hold their own in the struggle for life, against the overwhelming force and influence of mere number.