No. 3.] AMERICAN ASSOCIATION. 149 



not satisfied to leave the laws of life where he finds them, or to 

 pursue their study by logical and inductive reasoning. His 

 method of reasoning will not allow him to remain at rest; he 

 must be movins; onward in his unification of the universe. He 

 started with the lower order of animals, and brought them 

 through their various stages of progressive development until he 

 supposed he had touched the confines of man ; he then seems to 

 have recoiled, and hesitated to pass the boundary which separated 

 man from the lower order of animals ; but he saw that all his 

 previous logic was bad if he stopped there, so man was made 

 from the ape (with which no one can find fault, if the descent 

 be legitimate). This stubborn logic pushes him still further, 

 and he must find some connectins: link between that most re- 

 markable property of the human face called expression ; so his 

 ingenuity has given us a very curious and readable treatise on 

 that subject. Yet still another step must be taken in this linking 

 together man and the lower order of animals : it is in connection 

 with language ; and before long it is not unreasonable to expect 

 another production from that most wonderful and ingenious in- 

 tellect on the connection between the lansruase of man and the 

 brute creation. 



Let us see for a moment what this reasoning from analogy 

 would lead us to. The chemist has as much right to revel in 

 the imaginary formation of sodium from potassium, or iodine and 

 bromine from chlorine, by a process of development, and call it 

 science, as for the naturalist to revel in many of his wild specula- 

 tions, or for the physicist who studies the stellar space to imagine 

 it permeated by mind as well as light — mind such as has formed 

 the poet, the statesman, or the philosopher. Yet any chemist 

 who would quit his method of investigation, of marking every 

 foot of his advance by some indelible imprint, and go back to the 

 speculations of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and other alche- 

 mists of former ages, would soon be dropped from the list of 

 chemists and ranked with dreamers and speculators. 



What I have said is, in my humble opinion, warranted by 

 the departure Darwin and others have made from true science in 

 their purely speculative studies ; and neither he nor any other 

 searcher after truth expects to hazard great and startling opin- 

 ions without at the same time courting and desiring criticism ; 

 yet dissension from his views in no way proves him wrong — it 

 only shows how his ideas impress the minds of other men. And 



