i8o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of area is of more importance in the production of species capable of 

 spreading widely. (P. 105.) 



jSTow, on such a question as the origin of species, and in an express, 

 formal, scientiiic treatise on the subject, the expression of a belief, 

 where one looks for a demonstration, is simply provoking. We are 

 not concerned in the author's beliefs or inclinations to believe. Belief 

 is a state of mind short of actual knowledge. It is a state which may 

 govern action, when based upon a tacit admission of the mind's incom- 

 petency to prove a proposition, coupled with submissive acceptance of 

 an authoritative dogma, or worship of a favorite idol of the mind. We 

 readily concede, and it needs, indeed, no ghost to reveal the fact, 

 that the wider the area in which a species may be produced, the more 

 widely it will spread. But we fail to discern its import in respect 

 of the great question at issue. 



We have read and studied with care most of the monographs con- 

 veying the results of close investigations of particular groups of ani- 

 mals, but have not found, what Darwin asserts to be the fact, at least 

 as regards all those investigators of particular groups of animals and 

 plants whose treatises he has read, viz., that their authors 'are one and 

 all firmly convinced that each of the well-marked forms or species was 

 at the first independently created.' Our experience has been that the 

 monographers referred to have rarely committed themselves to any 

 conjectural hypothesis whatever, upon the origin of the species which 

 they have closely studied. 



Darwin appeals from the 'experienced naturalists whose minds are 

 stocked with a multitude of facts' which he assumes to have been 

 'viewed from a point of view opposite to his own,' to the 'few naturalists 

 endowed with much flexibility of mind,' for a favourable reception of 

 his hypothesis. We must confess that the minds to whose conclusions 

 we incline to bow belong to that truth-loving, truth- seeking, truth- 

 imparting class, which Eobert Brown, Bojanus, Eudolphi, Cuvier, 

 Ehrenberg, Herold, Kolliker, and Siebold, worthily exemplify. The 

 rightly and sagaciously generalizing intellect is associated with the 

 power of endurance of continuous and laborious research, exemplarily 

 manifested in such monographs as we have quoted below. Their 

 authors are the men who trouble the intellectual world little with their 

 beliefs, but enrich it greatly with their proofs. If close and long-con- 

 tinued research, sustained by the determination to get accurate results, 

 blunted, as Mr. Darwin seems to imply, the far-seeing discovering 

 faculty, then are we driven to this paradox, viz., that the elucidation of 

 the higher problems, nay the highest, in Biology, is to be sought for or 

 expected in the lucubrations of those naturalists whose minds are not 

 weighted or troubled with more than a discursive and superficial 

 knowledge of nature. 



