PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. Iv 



actual propositions of the work, and judged of these in connexion 

 with the actual facts, as presented by the highest authorities, m 

 spirit of unreserved submission to logical rule. 



Dr. Hitchcock. 



Dr Hitchcock, an American geologist of reputation who occupies 

 the respectable position of President of Amherst College, has pub- 

 lished a series of popular lectures, under the title of The Religion of 

 Geology and its Connected Sciences; and the ninth lee tore is de- 

 voted to a consideration of what Dr. Hitchcock calls the Hypothecs 

 of Creation by Law. As this lecture, if not the whole book ha 

 been evidently written in reference to the Vestiges, it might have 

 been expected that a correct account should be given of the views ot 

 that work. But no : it seems to be something quite beyond 

 intellectual scope of the opponents of the Vestiges to give_ a just 

 scription of its leading propositions. Even m the title Hypothesis 

 of Creation by Law," there is an injurious, though probably unin- 

 tentional misrepresentation, the actual proposition of the Ves 

 being Creation in the manner of law," that is, the Creator work- 

 ing in a natural course or by natural means. When the learned 

 lecturer proceeds to state the development hypothesis, he is equally 

 unfair, presenting not that hypothesis at all, but an account of the 

 imperfect approach to it which was made by Lamarck, 

 of the primitive simple animals, aided by "another principle, the 

 force of external circumstances," are described as leading to the pro- 

 duction of new organs ; and thus have animals been growing mor< 

 and more complicated and perfect from the earliest periods ot geolo- 

 gical history." He entirely overlooks the fundamental hypothesis 

 of the Vestiges, that " the several series of animated beings are, 

 under the providence of God, the results of an inherent impulse in 

 the forms of life to advance, in definite times by g^ a fon^hrough 

 grades of organization terminating m the highest dicotyledons and 

 vertebrata,"-the real hypothesis of devebpment always presened 

 in a more or less distinct form in the various editions of this woik^ 

 As Dr. Hitchcock's volume is dated "May 1 18ol, he might hav 

 referred to one of the later editions of the Vestiges ; in which case 

 he would have found the above form of the proposition. But even 

 in the second edition, to which we see him e1 ^^/^^ 

 might have seen that the idea of the author was that ^simple 

 and most primitive type, under a law to which that of like , p lodn - 

 tioit is subordinate, gave birth to the type next atove it, that th 

 again produced the next higher, and so on to the highest, the pro- 

 duction of new forms being nothing more than a new 

 progress in gestation, an event as simply natural and a ten d 

 little by an v circumstances of a wondertul or startling kind a, 



