EVOLUTION AND THEOLOGY. 255 



ing up theories of evolution in pure wantonness or 

 mere superfluity of naughtiness ; that it would have 

 been quite possible, as well as more proper, to leave 

 all such matters alone. Quieta non movere is doubt- 

 less a wise rule upon such subjects, so long as it is fair- 

 ly applicable. But the time for its application in re- 

 spect to questions of the origin and relations of exist- 

 ing species has gone by. To ignore them is to imitate 

 the foolish bird that seeks security by hiding its head 

 in the sand. Moreover, the naturalists did not force 

 these questions upon the world ; but the world they 

 study forced them upon the naturalists. How these 

 questions of derivation came naturally and inevitably 

 to be revived, how the cumulative probability that the 

 existing are derived from preexisting forms impressed 

 itself upon the minds of many naturalists and think- 

 ers, Mr. Henslow has briefly explained in the intro- 

 duction and illustrated in the succeeding chapters of 

 the first part of his book. Science, he declares, has 

 been compelled to take up the hypothesis of the evo- 

 lution of living things as better explaining all the 

 phenomena. In his opinion, it has become " infinite- 

 ly more probable that all living and extinct beings 

 have been developed or evolved by natural laws of 

 generation from preexisting forms, than that they, 

 with all their innumerable races and varieties, should 

 owe their existences severally to Creative fiats." This 

 doctrine, which even Dr. Hodge allows may possibly 

 be held in a theistic sense, and which, as we suppose, 

 is so held or viewed by a great proportion of the nat- 

 uralists of our day, Mr. Henslow maintains is fully 

 compatible with dogmatic as well as natural theology ; 



