258 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [xu. 



intermediate between these species. If any two species have 

 arisen from a common stock in the same way as the carrier and 

 the pouter, say, have arisen from the rock-pigeon, then the common 

 stock of these two species need be no more intermediate between 

 the two than the rock-pigeon is between the carrier and pouter. 

 Clearly appreciate the force of this analogy, and all the arguments 

 against the origin of species by selection, based on the absence of 

 transitional forms, fall to the ground. And Mr. Darwin s position 

 might, we think, have been even stronger than it is if he had not 

 embarrassed himself with the aphorism, &quot; Natura non facit 

 saltum&quot; which turns up so often in his pages. We believe, as 

 we have said above, that Nature does make jumps now and 

 then, and a recognition of the fact is of no small import 

 ance in disposing of many minor objections to the doctrine 

 of transmutation. 



But w r e must pause. The discussion of Mr. Darwin s argu 

 ments in detail would lead us far beyond the limits within 

 which we proposed, at starting, to confine this article. Our 

 object has been attained if we have given an intelligible, 

 however brief, account of the established facts connected with 

 species, and of the relation of the explanation of those facts 

 offered by Mr. Darwin to the theoretical views held by his 

 predecessors and his contemporaries, and, above all, to the 

 requirements of scientific logic. We have ventured to point 

 out that it does not, as yet, satisfy all those requirements ; but 

 we do not hesitate to assert that it is as superior to any preceding 

 or contemporary hypothesis, in the extent of observational and 

 experimental basis on which it rests, in its rigorously scientific 

 method, and in its power of explaining biological phenomena, as 

 was the hypothesis of Copernicus to the speculations of Ptolemy. 

 But the planetary orbits turned out to be not quite circular 

 after all, and, grand as was the service Copernicus rendered to 

 science, Kepler and Newton had to come after him. What if the 

 orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular ! What if 

 species should offer residual phenomena, here and there, not 

 explicable by natural selection ? Twenty years hence naturalists 



