190 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



whose speech, had they been hearing persons, 

 would have been scarcely intelligible. 



All others should be educated on the " Ger- 

 man" system. And it should be borne in mind 

 that it is for the poor that education on this sys- 



tem is so especially desirable. Important as it is 

 to all, to the poor the gift of speech is of intense 

 value, enabling them to make themselves under- 

 stood to the world at large. — Journal of the 

 Society of Arts. 



DR. ASA GRAY ON DARWINISM. 1 



PROF. GRAY has, in the volume under no- 

 tice, presented us with a compilation of 

 extremely thoughtful and erudite essays, col- 

 lected from the scientific periodicals in which at 

 various times they originally appeared, as reviews 

 of Mr. Darwin's book on the " Origin of Species " 

 and of kindred works. The main object of the 

 whole series is to vindicate the religious charac- 

 ter of the evolutionist, of whose theory Prof. 

 Gray entertains a high opinion, supporting it by 

 several new and cogent arguments, based on his 

 own immediate observation and researches. Dar- 

 win himself, the priest and prophet of the new 

 theory, thus expresses his convictions: "To my 

 mind, it accords better with what we know of the 

 laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the 

 production and extinction of the past and present 

 inhabitants of the world should have been due to 

 secondary causes, than that each species has 

 been independently created." It is therefore evi- 

 dent that Prof. Gray has not only reason, but 

 authority on his side, when he affirms that the 

 charge of atheism brought against the Evolution- 

 ists is a false conclusion, and that nothing hin- 

 ders the most thorough-going of the school from 

 indorsing the noble dictum of Aristotle, philoso- 

 pher and naturalist — " the Divine it is which 

 holds together all Nature." 



Experience teaches us to argue from analogy 

 and to refer productions in the past to the same 

 causes or sets of causes as those we see operating 

 in the present. It is nowhere within the knowl- 

 edge of living man that God acts, or has acted, 

 on any principle of caprice, working, as Lord Ba- 

 con says : " by means of his own rules upon the 

 creature, as fully and exactly as he could by 

 miracle and new creation." The immediate 

 source of the volition inherent in matter is out 

 of our ken, we see only the effects produced by 



1 " Parwiniana: Essays and Reviews pertaining to 

 Darwinism." Ry Asa Gray. Professor of Natural History 

 in Harvard University. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 



it, and to suppose that it ever acted in any other 

 way than that in which it now acts is obviously 

 to suppose that the earlier ages of the world were 

 not regulated by the laws which obtain in our 

 own, and that some radical and wholly unac- 

 countable change has taken place in Nature and 

 her modes of production and transmutation since 

 the commencement of our era. Moreover, the 

 whole tide of investigation and speculation with 

 regard to the various departments of natural sci- 

 ence sets in the direction of evolution ; and 

 again, arguing from analogy, we cannot be wrong 

 in apprehending a probable synthesis and har- 

 mony of the circle of natural and physical sci- 

 ences. The theory of derivative process in the 

 origin of animal species chimes in wonderfully 

 well with the result of M. Alphonse de Candolle's 

 botanical investigations, an account of which was 

 published before the appearance of Darwin's hy- 

 pothesis, in the " Geographie Botanique Raison- 

 nee." " Existing vegetation," says M. deCandolle, 

 in the final. chapter of this classical work, " must be 

 regarded as the continuation, through many geo- 

 logical and geographical changes, of the anterior 

 vegetations of the world ; consequently the pres- 

 ent distribution of species is explicable only in 

 the light of their geographical history." Certain 

 species or quasi-species may, in his opinion, have 

 originated through diversification under geo- 

 graphical isolation, and yet others independently 

 of such cause. 



With regard to geology, Sir Charles Lyell has 

 given us his conviction that "the natural opera- 

 tions now going on account for all known geo- 

 logical changes connecting the past with the pres- 

 ent by imperceptible gradations," and Prof. 

 Geikie has long since taught us that not only 

 upon such an hypothesis can the existence, 

 structure, and position of the sedimentary, or- 

 ganic, and igneous rocks of the earth be rightly 

 explained and understood. Extending our in 

 quiries into the domain of physics and chem" 



