CHAPTER VI. 
NATURAL SELECTION NOT MANIFESTED IN ORGANIC 
EVOLUTION (continued). 
(e) CLASSIFICATION. 
“ The King of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the 
head of the two ways, to use divination.”—Ezekiel, xxt., 21. 
The natural classification of organic beings turns out to 
be an arrangement according to their genetic relationships, 
and the result of this classification is seen in a tree-like 
ramification, having several points of divergence. This fact 
is accepted as a strong argument in favour of the process 
of Organic Evolution. If we had been privileged to be 
spectators of what took place when different groups of 
similar individuals bade farewell to one another at the 
parting of the way, we might then have divined the laws 
by which these initial modifications were effected. That 
the scientific imagination will be able to achieve this some 
day, I am fully confident; but the hour has not yet come, 
and we must move now, if we move at all, in the region 
of conjecture. This chapter is added, “ for the sake of 
symmetry,” to complete the logical statement of my argu 
ment, and yet deals with subjects on which our knowledge 
is still “ elementary,” in the ordinary sense of that word. 
It is obvious that all existing organisms may be classi 
fied so as to exhibit these tree-like ramifications ; and if 
the inference of the advocates of Organic Evolution is to 
be relied on, there must have been a point at which some 
inorganic elements became endowed with what we call