SPECULATION IN SCIENCE. 743 



present meeting. But, in order to illustrate this subject of method 

 more fully, I will refer to Darwin, whose name has become synonymous 

 with progressive development and natural selection, which we had 

 thought had died out with Lamarck fifty years ago. In Darwin we 

 have one of those philosophers whose great knowledge of animal and 

 vegetable life is only transcended by his imagination. In fact, he is 

 to be regarded more as a metaphysician with a highly-wrought im- 

 agination than as a scientist, although a man having a most wonderful 

 knowledge of the facts of natural history. In England and America 

 we find scientific men of the profoundest intellects differing completely 

 in regard to his logic, analogies, and deductions ; and in Germany and 

 France the same thing in the former of these countries some specu- 

 lators saying that " his theory is our starting-point," and in France 

 many of her best scientific men not ranking the labors of Darwin with 

 those of pure science. Darwin takes up the law of life, and runs it 

 into progressive development. In doing this, he seems to me to in- 

 crease the embarrassment which surrounds us on looking into the mys- 

 teries of creation. He is not satisfied to leave the laws of life where 

 he finds them, or to pursue their study by logical and inductive rea- 

 soning. His method of reasoning will not allow him to remain at 

 rest ; he must be moving onward in his unification of the universe. 

 He started with the lower order of animals, and brought them through 

 their various stages of progressive development until he supposed he 

 had touched the confines of man ; he then seems to have recoiled, and 

 hesitated to pass the boundary which separated man from the lower 

 order of animals ; but he saw that all his previous logic was bad if he 

 stopped there, so man was made from the ape (with which no one can 

 find fault, if the descent be legitimate). This stubborn logic pushes 

 him still further, and he must find some connecting link between that 

 most remarkable property of the human face called expression ; so his 

 ingenuity has given us a very curious and readable treatise on that 

 subject. Yet still another step must be taken in this linking together 

 man and the lower order of animals ; it is in connection with language ; 

 and before long it is not unreasonable to expect another production 

 from that most wonderful and ingenious intellect on the connection be- 

 tween the language of man and the brute creation. 



Let us see for a moment what this reasoning from analogy would 

 lead us to. The chemist has as much right to revel in the imaginary 

 formation of sodium from potassium, or iodine and bromine from 

 chlorine, by a process of development, and eall it science, as for the 

 naturalist to revel in many of his wild speculations, or for the physicist 

 who studies the stellar space to imagine it permeated by mind as well 

 as light mind such as has formed the poet, the statesman, or the 

 philosopher. Yet any chemist who would quit his method of investi- 

 gation, of marking every foot of his advance by some indelible im- 

 print, and go back to the speculations of Albertus Magnus, Roger 



