29 
NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
The Darwinian Theory of the Transmutation of Species, examined by a 
Graduate of the University of Cambridge. London: Nisbet and Co. 
1867. Pp. 386. 8yo. 
It is not the practice of this journal to deal much with speculative 
subjects. There is plenty to do in the much more important work of 
simple observation of nature, and its interpretation by legitimate in- 
duction. This may not be so attractive, but it is more valuable, 
and enduring. The imagination is a fruitful source of error in science, 
but its free use gives its employer a popular power which it is difficult 
otherwise to gain. The reading public, and the lecture-hearing 
publie run after novelties, and wherever a bold theory is presented 
there will always be found gaping erowds to swallow it ;—the theory 
may have no foundation or support in fact, but that is little matter. 
There is nothing so wild, nothing so absurd, but will find supporters 
in this strange world of ours. A plain narrative of the various hy- 
pothetical dreams in science which have been seriously propounded 
and strenuously defended since the restoration of learning, would be a 
curious, an almost incredible story. The latest phase of those 
dreams is that connected with the origin of the different forms of life 
which have existed and now exist on the globe; and in this country 
the most popular of them is that proposed by Darwin, illustrated 
by his numerous disciples, and now carried a stage further by the phy- 
sicists, who, attaching their materialistic notions to the views of the 
author of the hypothesis, have carried it much further than he would, 
we believe, be prepared to follow. 
The voluminous writings in exposition or defence of Darwinian 
views, are filled with plausibilities about everything, which to their 
authors appear to bear on the subject; but we affirm, and we carefully 
estimate the value of our words as we write them, that there has not 
in them all been adduced one fact which supports the notion that a 
single species has originated from another by natural selection or by 
any other cause. To argue that evidence does exist which has not yet 
been brought to light, or did exist but has been lost, is too absurd to 
be entertained for a moment as the basis of a theory claiming to be 
scientific; and yet this is all, in few words, that has been said for the 
