100 Review of Dandn 



ARTICLE IX. — Review of " Darioin on the Origin of Slides 

 hj means of Natural Selection^^ 



Nothing is more humbling to the scientific enquirer than to find 

 that he has arrived in the progress of his investigations at a point 

 beyond which inductive science fails to carry him. The physicist 

 finds himself in this position when required to explain the nature 

 of matter, or the cause of gravitation or cohesion, or the essence 

 of the mysterious influences of light, heat, and electricity. The 

 chemist is equally bafiled in the presence of those mysterious atoms 

 which are in all his processes, yet are not perceptible to his senses 

 The physiologist stands awe-stricken in the presence of a micro, 

 scopic cell whose structure he knows, but whose origin and won 

 derful vital endowments he fails to comprehend. The geologist 

 and the systematic zoologist are haunted in their dreams by those 

 multifarious species that appear and disappear, like phantoms on 

 the stage of geological time, yet seem so fixed and unchangeable 

 in existing nature. True science is always humble, for it knows 

 itself to be surrounded by mysteries — mysteries which only widen 

 as the sphere of its knowledge extends. Yet it is the ambition of 

 science to solve mysteries, to add one domain after another to its 

 conquests, though certain to find new and greater difficulties be- 

 yond. Hence we find every difficult problem assailed by a con- 

 stant succession of adventurers, some of them content cautiously 

 to explore the ground and prudently to retreat where to advance 

 is no longer safe ; others gathering all their strength for a rush 

 and a leap into an unknown and fathomless abyss. Both classes 

 do good to science. The first show us the real nature of the 

 difficulties to be overcome or to be abandoned as hopeless. The 

 second we follow to the last crumbling margin of sound fact and 

 deduction on which their feet have rested before their final plunge, 

 and thus gain an experience that otherwise we should not have 

 had the courage to seek. 



The question of the origin of species yields in difficulty to none 

 of the problems to which we have referred above, and Mr. Dar- 

 win's book is a noted instance of the second of the methods of 



* On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Pre- 

 servation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life ; by Charles Dar- 

 win, M.A. 1 vol. post 8vo. pp. 502. London : John Murray. New 

 York: Appletons. Montreal: Dawson. 1860. 



