14 THE DARWINIAN HYPOTHESIS i 



things are formed of the same elements as the 

 inorganic world, that they act and react upon it, 

 bound by a thousand ties of natural piety, is it 

 probable, nay is it possible, that they, and they 

 alone, should have no order in their seeming 

 disorder, no unity in their seeming multiplicity, 

 should suffer no explanation by the discovery 

 of some central and sublime law of mutual 

 connection ? 



Questions of this kind have assuredly often arisen, 

 but it might have been long before they received 

 such expression as would have commanded the 

 respect and attention of the scientific world, had 

 it not been for the publication of the work which 

 prompted this article. Its author, Mr. Darwin, 

 inheritor of a once celebrated name, won his spurs 

 in science when most of those now distinguished 

 were young men, and has for the last twenty 

 years held a place in the front ranks of British 

 philosophers. After a circumnavigatory voyage, 

 undertaken solely for the love of his science, Mr. 

 Darwin published a series of researches which at 

 once arrested the attention of naturalists and 

 geologists ; his generalisations have since received 

 ample confirmation and now command universal 

 assent, nor is it questionable that they have had 

 the most important influence on the progress of 

 science. More recently Mr. Darwin, with a 

 versatility which is among the rarest of gifts, 

 turned his attention to a most difficult question of 



