376 On Dr. Dmvsoii's ''Dawn of Life.'' 



it to be a solemn thing to have access to the first creature into 

 which He breathed the breath of Life " ! 



We have long looked upon the logic of Eozoonism as un- 

 sound in the extreme ; of late we have had strong grounds 

 for entertaining no very exalted opinion of its ethics ; and 

 now, since its Natural Theology has been unnecessarily and 

 prominently paraded before the "general reader," we feel our- 

 selves constrained to declare that this is essentially sensational — 

 suggesting Olympian Thaumaturgy rather than Teleogony, 

 and irreverently familiar in its utterances with a subject which 

 Science and Religion alike relegate to the mysterious, incom- 

 prehensible, and unresolvable " ways " and " thoughts " of 

 Providence. 



Supplementary Note. 



Dr. Dawson's paper, read before the Geological Society of 

 London on March 3, 1875, has appeared in No. 125, February 

 1876, of the Society's ^Quarterly Journal.' The paper Avas 

 too late for notice in the body of the present communication ; 

 we shall therefore put together a few remarks on it in the form 

 of an appendix. 



What we have already stated in connexion Avith the veins 

 of chrysotile crossing " chamber-casts," &c., renders it un- 

 necessary for any thing to be added on the subject. The same 

 remark applies to the '''' Archc^os'plicerinm.''^ 



"Canals filled with dolomite" or " calcite." As we now 

 learn that parts of certain " canals " containing calcite had 

 this mineral " dissolved entirely away in a dilute acid^'' we 

 shall, accepting this as reliable evidence, reduce the number 

 of our summarized " objections " to twenty by eliminating the 

 nineteenth, but adding the cases of such " canals " to the 

 eleventh. It must be understood that we hold all the cases 

 which have been brought forAvard to belong to the same cate- 

 gory as the rods in the Cornish serpentine and the Madras 

 ophite — that is, as examples of pseudomorphism. 



" The complicated theory of pseudomorphism and replace- 

 ment advocated by Messrs. Rowney and King " [sic) has been 

 much contemned by Drs. Dawson and Sterry Hunt ; so we 

 are greatly surprised to find that the author of '■ The Dawn 

 of Life ' has at last adopted it. " In one specimen," he re- 

 marks, " I observed a portion of the fossil entirely replaced hy 

 serpentine, the walls of the skeleton heing representedhy a lighter- 

 coloured serpentine than that filling the chambers, and still re- 

 taining traces of the canals. The ivalls thus replaced hy serpen- 

 tine cotdd he clearly traced into connexion with the p)ortions of 

 those still existing as calcite " (p. 70). 



The writer of the above has seemingly forgotten the piquant 



