II THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 51 



Such are the most essential characteristics of 

 species. Even were man not one of them a 

 member of the same system and subject to the 

 same laws the question of their origin, their 

 causal connexion, that is, with the other pheno 

 mena of the universe, must have attracted his 

 attention, as soon as his intelligence had raised 

 itself above the level of his daily wants. 



Indeed history relates that such was the case, 

 and has embalmed for us the speculations upon 

 the origin of living beings, which were among the 

 earliest products of the dawning intellectual activity 

 of man. In those early days positive knowledge 

 was not to be had, but the craving after it needed, 

 at all hazards, to be satisfied, and according to the 

 country, or the turn of thought, of the speculator, 

 the suggestion that all living things arose from the 

 mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from some 

 more anthropomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient 

 resting-place for his curiosity. The myths of 

 Paganism are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the 

 man who should revive them, in opposition to the 

 knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to 

 scorn ; but the coeval imaginations current among 

 the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by 

 writers whose very name and age are admitted by 

 every scholar to be unknown, have unfortunately 

 not yet shared their fate, but, even at this day, are 

 regarded by nine-tenths of the civilised world as 

 the authoritative standard of fact and the criterion 



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