What spectacle can be more beautiful than that of the inhabitants of the calm expanse of water of an atoll encircled by its ring of coral rock! Leaving locomotive frequenters of the calcarious basin out of the question, we may ask, Was direct creation after the dying out of its result as a "rugose coral" repeated to constitute the succeeding and superseding "tabulate coral"? Must we also invoke the miraculous power to initiate every distinct species of both rugosa and tabulata? These grand old groups have had their day and are utterly gone. When we endeavour to conceive or realise such mode of origin, not of them only but of their manifold successors, the miracle, by the very multiplication of its manifestations, becomes incredible--inconsistent with any worthy conception of an all-seeing, all-provident Omnipotence.
Being unable to accept the volitional hypothesis (of Lamarck) or the selective force exerted by outward circumstances (Darwin), I deem an innate tendency to deviate from parental type, operating through periods of adequate duration, to be the most probable way of operation of the secondary law whereby species have been derived one from another.
According to my derivative hypothesis a change takes place first in the structure of the animal, and this, when sufficiently advanced, may lead to modifications of habits. But species owe as little to the accidental concurrence of environing circumstances as kosmos depends upon a fortuitous concourse of atoms. A purposive route of development and change of correlation and inter-dependence, manifesting intelligent will, is as determinable in the succession of races as in the development and organisation of the individual.
Derivation holds that every species changes in time, by virtue of inherent tendencies thereto. Natural selection holds that no such change can take place without the influence of altered external circumstances educing or eliciting such change.
Derivation sees among the effects of the innate tendency to change, irrespective of altered surrounding circumstances, a manifestation of creative power in the variety and beauty of the results; and, in the ultimate forthcoming of a being susceptible of appreciating such beauty, evidence of the preordaining of such relation of power to the appreciation. Natural selection acknowledges that if power or beauty, in itself, should be a purpose in creation, it would be absolutely fatal to it as a hypothesis.