m.] THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 277 



proved that all species give rise to hybrids infertile 

 inter se, but there is much reason to believe that, in 

 crossing, species exhibit every gradation from perfect 

 sterility to perfect fertility. 



Such are the most essential characteristics of species. 

 Even were man not one of them — a member of the same 

 system and subject to the same laws — the question of 

 their origin, their causal connexion, that is, with the 

 other phenomena of the universe, must have attracted 

 his attention, as soon as his intelligence had raised itself 

 above the level of his daily wants. 



Indeed history relates that such was the case, and 

 has embalmed for us the speculations upon the origin 

 of living beings, which were among the earliest products 

 of the dawning intellectual activity of man. In those 

 early days positive knowledge was not to be had, but the 

 craving after it needed, at all hazards, to be satisfied, and 

 according to the country, or the turn of thought of the 

 speculator, the suggestion that all living things arose 

 from the mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from 

 some more anthropomorphic agency, afford ed a sufficient 

 resting-place for his curiosity. The myths of Paganism 

 are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the man who should 

 revive them, in opposition to the knowledge of our time, 

 would be justly laughed to scorn ; but the coeval imagi- 

 nations current among the rude inhabitants of Palestine, 

 recorded by writers whose very name and age are 

 admitted by every scholar to be unknown, have unfor- 

 tunately not yet shared their fate, but, even at this day, 

 are regarded by nine-tenths of the civilized world as the 

 authoritative standard of fact and the criterion of the 

 justice of scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the 

 origin of things, and, among them, of species. In this 

 nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical 



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