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over if the organ has been developed without Natural 
Selection, and then taken advantage of by the modified 
descendants, animal intelligence intervenes and not Natural 
Selection. Such an explanation can only have one mean 
ing. It refers to cases in which the nascent organ can be 
developed without Natural Selection. But if this is so, why 
do the advocates of Natural Selection maintain that the 
improvements in the nascent organ must be of the highest 
use to their happy possessors ? The only way of har 
monising the two statements is to suppose that it is their 
intention to affirm that nascent organs are generally de 
veloped by Natural Selection, and that on some rare 
occasions they are developed without its aid. If this is 
what we are to understand, we may remark that some 
writers do not by any means regard this evolution of 
nascent organs without Natural Selection as an exceptional 
phenomenon in nature. 
Mr. Joseph John Murphy, in a letter to Nattire, says :— 
“ If all perfectionment is due to the two causes of exercise through 
habit and Natural Selection among variations, it is obvious that no 
improvement can be effected which is not immediately useful. I be 
lieve that the animal kingdom, and in all probability the vegetable 
kingdom also, are full of organs which cannot have been evolved by 
anything like a Darwinian process, because their immature states 
cannot have been in functional activity. . . . Muller, in his 
Facts for Darwin, says of the transition from the Zoea to Mysis form, 
in the metamorphoses of a species of Peneus or prawn, that ‘ the long 
abdomen, which just before was laboriously dragged along as a 
useless burden, now, with its powerful muscles, jerks the animal 
through the water in a series of lively jumps.’ The Nauplius, which 
is the form in which this Peneus leaves the egg, has no abdomen ; 
this is acquired when the Nauplius develops into a Zoea, and con 
sists of segments which appear between the body and the tail of the 
Nauplius. Muller’s account seems to show that this abdomen is 
developed before it is useful to the animal, and for the purpose of 
becoming useful further on in its development. . . . Another 
instance of the same kind is that of those Ascidian larvae, which are 
the probable origin of the vertebrata. Of what use can the dorsal 
groove and the notochord be to those minute and lowly organised