THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' 



537 



and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as 

 "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this 

 high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one 

 of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want 

 of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, t at, 

 by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, 

 " Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are 

 tending to become men ; " who is so ignorant of paleontology, 

 that he can talk of the " flowers and fruits " of the plants of 

 the carboniferous epoch ; of comparative anatomy, that he 

 can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of the venomous 

 snakes to be " entirely separate from the ordinary laws of 

 animal life, and peculiar to themselves; " of the rudiments 

 of physiology, that he can ask, " what advantage of life could 

 alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can 

 be evaporated.'' " Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this 

 outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimu- 

 lation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the his- 

 tory of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and 

 Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso 

 that he cannot '' consent to test the truth of Natural Sci- 

 ence by the word of Revelation;" but, for all that, he 

 devotes pages to the exposition of his conviction that Mr. 

 Darwin's theory " contradicts the revealed relation of the 

 creation to its Creator," and is " inconsistent with the fulness 

 of his glory.'.' 



If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the ' Origin 

 of Species ' to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time 

 of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish 

 and unmannerly as the * Quarterly Review ' article, unless, 

 perhaps, the address of a Reverend Professor to the Dublin 

 Geological Society might enter into competition with it. But 

 a large proportion of Mr. Darwin's critics had a lamentable 

 resemblance to the ' Quarterly ' reviewer, in so far as they 

 lacked either the will, or the wit, to make themselves masters 

 of his doctrine ; hardly any possessed the knowledge required 

 to follow him through the immense range of biological and 



