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Dear Sir,-- ... I presume your question "Why?" as to the varying colour
of individual hairs and feathers, and the regular varying of adjacent
hairs, etc., to form the surface pattern, applies to the ultimate cause
which enables those patterns to be hereditary, and, in the case of
birds, to be reproduced after moulting yearly.
The purpose, or end they serve, I have, I think, sufficiently dealt with
in my "Darwinism"; the method by which such useful tints and markings
are produced, because useful, is, I think, clearly explained by the law
of Natural Selection or Survival of the Fittest, acting through the
universal facts of heredity and variation.
But the "why"--which goes further back, to the directing agency which
not only brings each special cell of the highly complex structure of a
feather into its exactly right position, but, further, carries pigments
or produces surface striae (in the case of the metallic or interference
colours) also to their exactly right place, and nowhere else--is the
mystery, which, if we knew, we should (as Tennyson said of the flower in
the wall) "know what God and Man is."
The idea that "cells" are all conscious beings and go to their right
places has been put forward by Butler in his wonderful book "Life and
Habit," and now even Haeckel seems to adopt it. All theories of
heredity, including Darwin's pangenesis, do not touch it, and it seems
to me as fundamental as life and consciousness, and to be absolutely
inconceivable by us till we know what life is, what spirit is, and what
matter is; and it is probable that we must develop in the spirit world
some few thousand million years before we get to this knowledge--if
then!
My book, "Man's Place in the Universe," shows, I think, indications of
the vast importance of that Universe as the producer of Man which so
many scientific men to-day try to belittle, because of what may be, in
the infinite!--Yours very truly,
ALFRED R.
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