253 



ing periods the other groups are added to this, making their appear- 

 ance in a series which corresponds through a continually higher or- 

 ganization, i. e., continually more manifold vital processes, to the suc- 

 cessively more manifold and complicated physical conditions which 

 come into action. Thus the stemless Cryptogamia are followed by 

 those provided with stems and leaves. Then the Gymnospores 

 (Conifers and Cycadese) enter upon the field; to these succeed the 

 Monocotyledons, and lastly appear the Dicotyledons. Imperfect as 

 are the documents we have obtained, and little as we have yet de- 

 cyphered of them, yet in no period do we find the appearance of a 

 wholly new creation, but the organic beings are always added gradu- 

 ally ; the lowest members of one period succeeding to the highest 

 members of the foregoing, in such a manner that they at least repeat 

 its principal type ; nay, we may even say more than this : if both ge- 

 nera and species, or even families of plants, have disappeared from the 

 earth, there does not exist, even in the oldest remains, any peculiar 

 great group, a form of plants constituting as it were a stage of develop- 

 ment of the vegetable world, which has not its representative also ex- 

 hibited in the Flora of the present world. 



" This view, that the whole fulness of the vegetable world has been 

 gradually developed out of a single cell and its descendants, by gra- 

 dual formation of varieties, which became stereotyped into species, and 

 then, in like manner, became the producers of new forms, is at least 

 quite as possible as any other, and is perhaps more probable and cor- 

 respondent than any other, since it carries back the absolutely inex- 

 plicable, namely, the production of an organic being, into the very 

 narrowest limits which can be imagined." — p. 292. 



This, it will be said, is Vestigianism ; but it differs from that doc- 

 trine, inasmuch as it supposes the gradual addition of new organs to 

 those previously present, not the transmutation of such organs into 

 others. As the author observes — " That the germ of inorganic life came 

 forth upon the earth once, at least, out of the strife of the inorganic ele- 

 ments, admits of no doubt ;" still, there is another question — " has this 

 process occurred more than once ? And must it have occurred more fre- 

 quently ? " He further asks — " Since in these matters every one has, and 

 may have, his own proper fantasies, why should not I too have mine ? " 



The lectures conclude with one upon " The ^Esthetics of the Vege- 

 table World." And here we can neither pretend to follow the author 

 in his metaphysical flights, nor to be able to give our readers any in- 

 telligible account of them : choosing rather to quote the lines of 

 Faust used as a motto to this lecture, as meeting our own case : — 

 Vol. hi. 2 m 



