you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous
fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and
intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such
casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain
landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. To call this Natural
Selection is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing
but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally
impossible to the spirits and souls of the righteous. If it be no
blasphemy, but a truth of science, then the stars of heaven, the showers
and dew, the winter and summer, the fire and heat, the mountains and
hills, may no longer be called to exalt the Lord with us by praise;
their work is to modify all things by blindly starving and murdering
everything that is not lucky enough to survive in the universal struggle
for hogwash.


THE BRINK OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

Thus did the neck of the giraffe reach out across the whole heavens and
make men believe that what they saw there was a gloaming of the gods.
For if this sort of selection could turn an antelope into a giraffe, it
could conceivably turn a pond full of amoebas into the French
Academy. Though Lamarck's way, the way of life, will, aspiration, and
achievement, remained still possible, this newly shewn way of hunger,
death, stupidity, delusion, chance, and bare survival was also possible:
was indeed most certainly the way in which many apparently intelligently
designed transformations had actually come to pass. Had I not preluded
with the apparently idle story of my revival of the controversial
methods of Elijah, I should be asked how it was that the explorer who
opened up this gulf of despair, far from being stoned or crucified as