138 Bibliographical Notice. 



character is fully exercised by her ; and the being is placed under 

 well-suited conditions of life""(p. 83). 



But who is this " Nature," we have a right to ask, who has such 

 tremendous power, and to whose efficiency such marvellous perform- 

 ances are ascribed? What are her image and attributes, when 

 dragged from her wordy lurking-place ? Is she aught but a pestilent 

 abstraction, like dust cast into our eyes to obscure the workings of 

 an Intelligent First Cause of all ? 



Although it is quite possible that there may be a final cause for every 

 thing, and every character of a thing, in nature (in the same sense 

 as one of our acutest metaphysicians has contended that religion is 

 the final cause of the human mind), we should nevertheless be ex- 

 ceedingly reluctant to press this doctrine too far, for all experience 

 warns us that it may become an impediment, rather than a help, to 

 the progress of scientific discovery. Yet it is one thing to give it 

 more than its due, another to reject it altogether : and those who, 

 like our author, prefer being shipwrecked bodily on the rocks of 

 Scylla to running the slightest risk from the opposite Charybdis, need 

 but to be reminded that a proper use of it has been as fruitful in guid- 

 ing the researches of our greatest physiologists as the abuse of it has 

 been instrumental in perverting them. And we may confidently 

 affirm that Bacon's famous censure on the "barrenness" of these 

 "vestal virgins" (which was applied, be it remembered, to physics 

 only, and which has been made so much of by the advocates for the 

 sufficiency of secondary causes in the organic world) would have been 

 less severe " could he have prophetically anticipated," as Sedgwick 

 has well remarked, " the modern discoveries in physiology." 



But, before dismissing these immediate considerations, we must 

 say a word or two on the fact of "individual variability," which we 

 cannot but think has been made too much of throughout the volume 

 before us. Without it, "natural selection" would be of course im- 

 possible that is evident ; but is its presence sufficiently significant to 

 render the theory in any degree probable ? This is the question with 

 which we are now concerned. Mr. Darwin says that it is only neces- 

 sary for an individual to vary, be it ever so little, for the principle of 

 natural selection to be established ; but to us it seems almost incre- 

 dible that the general "struggle for existence," or even the extreme 

 pressure of peculiar circumstances from without, should find in mere 

 "individual variability" a sufficient primum mobile to lay the foun- 

 dation of a series of after-divergences (in a given, undeviating direc- 

 tion) destined, each, to accumulate, by infinitesimal degrees, into 

 such successive, intermittent, well-marked forms as to merit, at each 

 stage, the rank of " species." For " individual variability" (so called) 

 is scarcely more, after all, than one of the many proofs, or indices, of 

 individuality; so that to assert its existence is simply to state a 

 truism. Amongst the millions of people who have been born into 

 the world, we are certain that no two have ever been precisely 

 alike in every respect ; and, in a similar manner, it is not too much 

 te affirm the same of all living creatures (however alike some of 

 them may seem to our uneducated eyes) that have ever existed. We 



