CHARLES DARWIiSr. 



127 



inferred that in order to acconimodate themselves to these chanjics, 

 phuits and animals, by not nsiiit;: organs no longer required, and by 

 ao(luiring and developing new organs to fulfil new functions, have 

 changed, little by little, their form, their organisation, and their 

 faculties, difference of situation and exposure thus causing them to 

 vary, and, under a continuance of the same difference of circum- 

 stances, such variations becoming essential and being transmitted, 

 so that at the end of many generations these altered individuals 

 are transfonned into a new and distinct species. This theory is a 

 decided advance upon that of Erasmus Darwin, for it substitiites 

 variations in structure, etc., such as the suppression of some 

 organs and the development of others, effected by the pressure 

 of changes in external conditions, for his view that plants and 

 animals have an inherent tendency to improve and take advan- 

 tage of such changes, but it does not explain why the variations 

 peipetuated are such as tend necessarily to raise the type. 



Robert Chambers, in 1844, in his anonymous work entitled 

 ' Vestiges of the jS'atural History of Creation,' brought forward 

 much additional evidence in favour of the transmutation of species 

 and their progressive development in time, and showed how 

 recent discoveries in embryology and palaeontology were in 

 harmony, — the higher animals, including man, resembling, in 

 the successive phases of their existence from an early embryonic 

 condition, lower classes in the animal kingdom, in the order in 

 which these classes successively appear in geological time. The 

 object of this work, the author stated in his subsequently- 

 published ' Explanations,' was " to show that the whole 

 revelation of the works of God presented to our senses and 

 reason is a system based in what we are compelled, for want 

 of a better term, to call law ; by which, however, is not meant 

 a system independent or exclusive of Deity, but one which only 

 proposes a certain mode of his working." 



Goethe expressed himself so ambiguously about transformation 

 and metamorphosis, that it has been questioned whether he really 

 believed in evolution, or merely indulged in flights of poetical 

 imagination. "While he says of Nature: " She is ever shaping new 

 forms : what is, has never yet been ; what has been, comes not 

 again;" he also says: "Incessant life, development, and move- 

 ment are in her, hit she advances not ;'^ an expression quite at 

 variance with the very principle of evolution. And yet he goes 

 further than most evolutionists would do when he says : 



"By fiery vapours rose this rock you're seeing. 

 In moisture came organic life to bvingy 



