Looking at the eye, we are at first tempted to think that it must be the telescope over again, only more so; we are tempted to see it as something that has grown up little by little from small beginnings, as the result of effort well applied and handed down from generation to generation till, in the vastly greater time during which the eye has been developing as compared with the telescope, a vastly more astonishing result has been arrived at. According to Mr. Darwin, we should be wrong. Design had a great deal to do with the telescope, but it had nothing or hardly anything whatever to do with the eye. The telescope owes its development to cunning, the eye to luck, which, it would seem, is so far more cunning than cunning that one does not quite understand why there should be any cunning at all. The main means of developing the eye was, according to Darwin, natural selection. Natural selection, according to him, though not the sole, is still the most important means of its development and modification. What, then, is natural selection?

Darwin has told us this on the title page of the Origin of Species. He there defines it as “The Preservation of Favored Races”; “Favored” is “Fortunate,” and “Fortunate,” “Lucky”; it is plain, therefore, that with Darwin, natural selection comes to “The Preservation of Lucky Races,” and that he regarded luck as the most important feature in connection with the development even of so apparently purposive an organ as the eye, and as the one, therefore, on which it was most proper to insist. And what is luck but absence of intention or design? What, then, can Mr. Darwin’s title page amount to when written out plainly, but to an assertion that the main means of modification has been the preservation of races whose variations have been unintentional?