46o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE CHAIN OF SPECIES. 



By Hon. LAWRENCE JOHNSON. 

 PART II. 



WHEN Wolf, Goethe, Oken, and Geoffroy St.-Hilaire began to tell 

 us that the method of the creation of living creatures is an evo- 

 lution, it was far from satisfactory. To comprehend the proposition in 

 the first place was exceedingly difficult. It was almost incomprehen- 

 sihle, indeed, to minds tutored in the anthropomorphic notions of 

 spasmodic and arbitrary special efforts on the part of some Demiurgus. 

 Educated to see in Nature what were called evidences of design, 

 meaning plan and purpose according to our finite ideas of design, we 

 could not rise to the conception of the continuous action of universal 

 law ; and every thing not easily construed by our preconceived teleol- 

 ogy was settled by the convenient doctrines of miracles and cata- 

 clysms. In another way, also, the world was not prepared for the 

 proposition; for, in the second place, the proofs were hidden away in 

 the still undiscovered facts of homology. The science of morphology 

 was yet to be created. Not yet was it known that Bryant's solemn 



verses — 



" All that tread 

 The globe are but a handful to the tribes 

 That slumber in its bosom " — 



are as applicable to the genera and species of all living creatures as to 

 the individuals of the human race ; that the organic forms now extant 

 are in simplest truth insignificant, both as to numbers and varieties, 

 when compared with those which have preceded them and which have 

 perished forever. 



No wonder, then, that the new-fledged doctrine of evolution soon 

 went out of fashion when even the great disciples of the great leaders 

 just mentioned, Lamarck and the elder Darwin, had no better explana- 

 tion to offer than the hypothesis of transmutation. Yet it ought not 

 to be forgotten that their principal opponents were not devout profess- 

 ors of religion and theology, to the really qualified of whom, it must 

 have been indifferent ; but Voltaire, Frederick II., Cuvier, and Agassiz, 

 men whom no one ever suspected of any profound knowledge of theol- 

 ogy, or of special reverence for its deductions. 



But now the mists are clearing away, just as, according to the 

 logic of things, we should expect. For there is evolution in human 

 thought and comprehension, as in all things else. Yet the how—the 

 question of the method— the process of the development of life— still 

 confronts us; and the recent labors of Charles Darwin, Wallace, 

 Yoght, Ilaeckel, Cope, and others, have taught us that the answer is 



