38 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



prehensible to people who have not given it patient and prolonged 

 study. 



Our author appears to be in possession of some very definite in- 

 formation respecting the solar system, not set down in the ordinary 

 treatises on astronomy. He knows that it was " arranged with refer- 

 ence to the law of universal gravitation," that " the existing arrange- 

 ments must have been intentional," that " there is the strongest evi- 

 dence that a certain means was chosen and intentionally put into op- 

 eration." The Creator, however, he explains (page 183), "does not 

 meet an external demand." He creates the demand or purpose him- 

 self and then satisfies it. What kind of " purpose " that can be that 

 has no relation to any need the writer does not explain, though, of 

 course, he knows. Strange to say, we read a little farther on (page 

 207) that the Creator is " governed by a purpose in ail that he does." 

 Does this mean that the Creator ties his own hands by the purposes 

 that he forms without any reference to external demands ? Again, 

 we are assured with tiresome iteration that the Creator does nothing - 

 that is " useless." Useless to whom ? To himself ? Or to an ex- 

 ternal world ? If to himself, the remark seems senseless ; if to an ex- 

 ternal world, then there is the meeting of an external demand. 



But if, on the one hand, our author knows many remarkable things 

 that are not known to the world at large, there are other things quite 

 within the range of his reading of which he seems to have remained 

 willingly ignorant. He wants to know (page 214) how it came to be 

 imposed upon a whole group of beings, as a law of Nature, that what- 

 ever utility of structure was of paramount importance to the whole 

 group should be preserved against the modifying influences that were 

 destined (on the theory of evolution) to produce species differing 

 absolutely from each other." The answer is, of course, that any de- 

 viation from a structure that was of paramount utility would consign 

 the organism manifesting it to destruction ; and that eventually the 

 typical organization would by age-long inheritance become so stamped 

 into the constitution of those sharing it that a deviation of any mo- 

 ment would become matter of simple impossibility. 



Taking the work before us as a whole, we may say that, while it 

 evinces a creditable amount of industry on the part of its author, and 

 while, as a piece of special pleading against the hypothesis of evolu- 

 tion, it shows an ingenuity that, in another sphere, must possess con- 

 siderable value, it betrays an altogether insufficient acquaintance with 

 the data on which the hypothesis in question is founded, and is, more- 

 over, vitiated by the constant use of an assumption which Kant has 

 abundantly shown to be an altogether illegitimate starting-point for 

 scientific inquiry. The most serious injustice it does to the doctrine 

 of evolution is in representing it as an irreligious system of thought. 

 No scientific doctrine can by any possibility be irreligious, for the 

 most that science can do is to indicate the limits of the known and 



