Ixii PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. 



DOW proceeding on the face of the earth. What was the law? 

 Answer : the physiologist sees a scale in animated nature, and the 

 embryotic progress of a high animal is represented in characters 

 pertaining to the series below it in the scale. The geologist tells us 

 that, to all appearance, the animals were introduced in an order 

 similar to this scale. Over all, it is not conclusively settled that life 

 does not, in certain circumstances, spring from inorganic elements, 

 and that changes of species do not take place, in the present day. We 

 thus see, not perhaps the facts of creation and development that 

 may be left in doubt but as it were the shadows of those facts, 

 impressing at least their great probability. 



It may be believed that so much perverse misjudgment on these 

 points is simply owing to intellectual obtuseness. It may be believed 

 that men of undoubted learning and talents are unconscious of the 

 transparent fallacy 7 , that the disproof of non parental generation, which 

 only reflects on the continuance of animated nature on earth, is con- 

 clusive against a particular view of the mode of its beginning the 

 legitimate tendency of the said disproof being to establish an admitted 

 absurdity, namety, that animated nature has had no beginning at all. 

 It may be believed, even of such men, that they are simply under a 

 mistake when they so grossly misrepresent the proposition brought 

 forward and illustrated in this work, and draw from it vile conse- 

 quences which may with equal justice be drawn from every fact or 

 hypothesis which tends to establish a law of nature. But assuredly 

 it requires an exaltation of charity beyond all common bounds to 

 make these admissions in their favour. 



[Since these controversial notes were written in 1853, the opposi- 

 tion has been in a great measure silenced. Mr. Miller survived 

 1heir publication three years without making any formal acknow- 

 ledgment of the errors he had fallen into; but it appears that, since 

 his ever-to-be lamented death, his work has been withdrawn from 

 circulation. Meanwhile a change has been going on in the views of 

 scientific men regarding the origin of species. Natural, as opposed 

 to miraculous creation, is now an open question. We even hear 

 from a physiologist of reputation * of " that hypothesis to which alone 

 the stud} 7 of physiology lends any support .... wliicli is now 

 winning at least the provisional assent of all the best thinkers of 

 the day .... that the forms or species of living beings, as we know 

 them, have been produced by the gradual modification of pre-existing 

 species." This view, in the botanical department, has been now 

 formally taken by Wallace and Hooker. In the zoological, it has 

 been embraced by Darwin, by Huxley, and by Lyell. A revolution 

 coming to a point so nearly the same as the hypothesis of the 

 Vestiges could scarcely have been expected a few years ago, when 

 Professor Sedgwick was launching his ill-considered invectives 

 against all who dared to treat the origin of species as a scientific 

 question. 



* Professor Huxley. Macinillan's Magazine, Dec. 1859. 



