BRITAIN. 91 



tuary, and has fallen into a sort of spiritual idolatry, less gross, it may be, but hardly 

 less pernicious to man's higher capacities, than is the simple slavery of the animal 

 appetites ; this partaking more of the brute, but that of the demon. We can- 

 not consider the present essay, in spite of its catching title, as by any means 

 a happy sample of Dr. Knox's characteristic style, " toads and diamonds" drop- 

 ping promiscuously : — along with some sparkling bits, the spotted progeny 

 predominate here so nakedly. Let him write, indeed, as perversely or as care- 

 lessly as he will, this is to be said for him, he is not often vapid ; the quality 

 of the meat may not be undeniable, but it is pretty sure to be seasoned with 

 some salt sufficiently pungent, if not exactly Attic. For the readers of the 

 4 Zoologist,' however, he seems, on this occasion, to have dished up the veriest 

 sweepings of his study. If the wit be not superabundant and somewhat heavy ; 

 to make up for this, the reasoning is light enough and flimsy in texture. Logic 

 has been likened, somewhere, to the closed fist — Rhetoric to the open hand ; the 

 logic Dr. Knox employs would not altogether justify the comparison. If he 

 has managed to exemplify in a very small compass all the tritest fallacies that 

 writers on Logic have taken pains to distinguish and name ; at least they glare 

 out here as " patent fallacies." We had marked for extract a few particularly 

 fine specimens, from Dr. Knox, of the more common forms of false reasoning 

 — " Begging the question" — M Irrelevant conclusion" — '' Equivocal middle term," 

 &c, &c. — when we lighted on a sentence so inimitably characteristic in its sa- 

 pient incoherency, that we have put all the rest aside to make room for this one. 

 Reader, attend ; it is the clew to almost the sole properly Zoological inquiry in 

 the whole of these thirty pages. Dr. Knox loquitur, more Socratico— Is species 

 always young, ok is it genus? What felicity of expression here! what 

 profundity of thought ! It is, possibly, as hard to see to the bottom of a puddle 

 as of the ocean ; but it is not because they are both equally deep. A fool, it has 

 been proverbially said, may ask questions that a wise man is not able to answer. 

 To do Dr. Knox justice, he has not answered the question he has here put — in 

 either capacity. That oracular deliverance, however, he makes the key-note to 

 a pretty smart dissertation on his favourite theme, Specific transmutation. It 

 seems almost unaccountable that Dr. Knox, a clever practical Anatomist, should 

 so totally misapprehend and misrepresent the results of Embryological dis- 

 coveries, as to repeat here the intrepid assertion, that " The young of all the 

 species of the same genus possess at first all the specific characters of the dif- 

 ferent species of the genus." Had it been stated that at a certain period of 

 embryonic life, in every species, no characters are apparent but what are in 

 common to all the species of the same genus at a more advanced stage of ex- 

 istence, the proposition would be intelligible, and might be susceptible of proof 

 or disproof by comparative observations. As it stands, the sentence is simply 

 absurd, affirming an impossibility. The characters of each species necessarily 

 negative those of every other, in one or more particulars ; and contradictories 

 predicated of the same subject cannot both be true. We are not going to discuss 

 the theory of Specific transmutation here ; we doubt, indeed, if the materialists 

 who countenance this would accept of Dr. Knox for their champion, or confess 

 themselves vanquished in his defeat. What the venerable author of the 

 M Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge" objected to the 

 theory of " Gradual development," broached long ago by Lamarck — when 

 this was attempted to be resuscitated here in the subtle and shallow 

 " Vestiges of Creation" — continues to apply equally to that later modifi- 

 cation of it, which Dr. Knox has derived from other Continental sources. 

 Neither the ascertained facts of living nature, nor the results of geolo- 

 gical discoveries furnish a proof, or probability in its favour. It is mere 

 gratuitous theory, which cannot even lay claim to the title of a scientific 

 hypothesis. This is often useful, in order to give its direction to observation or 

 experiment, as an attempt, by anticipation, to account for a set of observed facts 

 as yet insufficient to sustain a complete induction. The Development theory 

 has to fabricate both its facts and fancies, for ever revolving in a vicious circle. 

 We ask for proofs, and are to rest satisfied, forsooth, with being told that the 



