216 Reviews and Notices of BooJcs. 



sight into the secrets of the vegetable organization — a principle 

 which lias of late been alnaost elevated to the rank of a demon- 

 strated truth by minute observations, — he proceeds to say tiiat — 



" Those who believe with the Author (Mr. Darwin), that all 

 animals, as well as plants, have sprung from not more than four 

 or five progenitors, will trace in the sexual system the cause of 

 the existence of all but the lowest forms of life ; not indeed in the 

 sense in which ttie vulgar understand it, as if no fresh individual 

 of a species could have been called into existence by any other 

 and simpler agency, but because no deviation from the primeval 

 type, and therefore no progress towards a more improved form, 

 could otherwise have taken place, except indeed in a few excjep- 

 tional cases, under the influences of diff ^ent external conditions. 

 For my own part, I am unwilling to be set down as yielding an 

 entire and unqualified assent to this doctrine, when pushed to its 

 extreme consequences ; for although I must leave it to Naturalists 

 more equal to the task than myself, to enter the lists against an 

 antagonist furnished with so vast an armoury of facts, and gifted 

 with so tiingular a power of applying them to the purposes of his 

 theory, I must demur at considering the distinctive faculties of 

 the beino;s that stand in the hioher ranks of the creation as mere 

 developments of those which exist in the lower. I can hardly 

 bring myself to believe, that the activity, the quick perceptions, 

 the various instincts, which we observe in the vertebrate, can have 

 been elaborated out of the dull vegetative faculties of the inver- 

 tebral class ; and still le-s that the reason, the imagination, the 

 moral sense of man, can have been owing to a mere expansion of 

 the brain of the Gorilla." 



Towards the conclusion. Dr. Daubeny adduces a counter-argu- 

 ment to the proposed theory which, though employed by some 

 naturalists in the controversy, has not been perhaps as yet suffi- 

 ciently estimated. The foundation of Mr. Darwin's reasonings is 

 the achievements of human skill in the domesticatTon of animals, 

 and the facts connected with domestication are those to which he 

 constantly refers with confidence in support of his tlieory. " All 

 the rest, however approjmate to the development of his argument, 

 however well calculated to remove objections, or to impa't a 

 degree of probability to his speculations, seem either to lie beyond 

 the range of actual experience, or to lend him only that indirect 

 support which may be afforded by their accordance with the hy- 

 pothesis, once assumed to be true. . . .But," continues Dr. Dau- 



