xii.] THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 241 



subject to the same laws the question of their origin, their causal 

 connexion, that is, with the other phsenomena 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 anthro 

 pomorphic 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 know 

 ledge 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 civilized world as the authoritative standard 

 of fact and the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions, 

 in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among them, of 

 species. In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern 

 physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is 

 the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the ortho 

 dox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after 

 truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been 

 embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of 

 Bibliolaters ? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose 

 sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonize 

 impossibilities whose life has been wasted in the attempt to 

 force the generous new wine of Science into the old bottles 

 of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong 

 party ? 



It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has 



R 



