DARWIN AND HIS REVIEWERS. 137 



philosophical objections advanced by Agassiz, and to 

 most of those urged by the other American critics, 

 against Darwin himself. 



Proposing now to criticise the critics, so far as to 

 see what their most general and comprehensive objec- 

 tions amount to, we must needs begin with the Amer- 

 ican reviewers, and with their arguments adduced to 

 prove that a derivative hypothesis ought not to he true, 

 or is not possible, philosophical, or theistic. 



It must not be forgotten that on former occasions 

 very confident judgments have been pronounced by 

 very competent persons, which have not been finally 

 ratified. Of the two great minds of the seventeenth 

 century, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly relig- 

 ious as well as philosophical, one produced the theory 

 of gravitation, the other objected to that theory that it 

 was subversive of natural religion. The nebular hy- 

 pothesis — a natural consequence of the theory of grav- 

 itation and of the subsequent progress of physical and 

 astronomical discovery — has been denounced as athe- 

 istical even down to our own day. But it is now r large- 

 ly adopted by the most theistical natural philosophers 

 as a tenable and perhaps sufficient hypothesis, and 

 where not accepted is no longer objected to, so far as 

 we know, on philosophical or religious grounds. 



The gist of the philosophical objections urged by 



pie, of an increase of potency at each dilution. Probably the supposed 

 transmutation is per saltus. " Homoeopathic doses of transmutation," 

 indeed! Well, if we really must swallow transmutation in some form 

 or other, as this reviewer intimates, we might prefer the mild homceo- 

 pathic doses of Darwin's formula to the allopathic bolus which the 

 Edinburgh general practitioner appears to be compounding. 



