DEGENERATION. ii 



called, of the facts which have been ascertained as 

 to living things ; in other words, it assigns living 

 things to their causes, gives them their place in the 

 Order of Nature. 



It is a very general popular belief at the present 

 day that the Darwinian theory is simply no more 

 than a capricious and anti-theological assertion that 

 mankind are the modified descendants of ape-like 

 ancestors. 



Though most of my readers, I do not doubt, 

 know how imperfect and erroneous a conception this 

 is, yet I shall not, I think, be wasting time in stating 

 what the Darwinian theory really is. In fact, it is so 

 continuously misrepresented and misunderstood, that 

 no opportunity should be lost of calling' attention to 

 its real character. Bit by bit, naturalists had suc- 

 ceeded in discovering the order of nature — so far that 

 all the great facts of the universe, the constitution 

 and movements of the heavenly bodies, the form of 

 our earth, and all the peculiarities of its crust, had 

 been successfully assigned to one set of causes — tJie 

 properties of matter^ which are set forth in what we 

 know by the name of the " laws of physics and 

 chemistry." Whilst geologists, led by Lyell, had 



