THE FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 



[April and May, 1886.] 

 I. 



WITHIN the recollection of men now in middle life, opinion 

 concerning the derivation of animals and plants was in 

 a chaotic state. Among the unthinking there was tacit 

 belief in creation by miracle, which formed an essential 

 part of the creed of Christendom; and among the thinking 

 there were two parties, each of which held an indefensible 

 hypothesis. Immensely the larger of these parties, includ 

 ing nearly all whose scientific culture gave weight to their 

 judgments, though not accepting literally the theologically- 

 orthodox doctrine, made a compromise between that doctrine 

 and the doctrines which geologists had established; while 

 opposed to them were some, mostly having no authority iu 

 science, who held a doctrine which was heterodox both 

 theologically and scientifically. Professor Huxley, in his 

 lecture on &quot; The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species,&quot; 

 remarks concerning the first of these parties as follows : 



&quot; One-and-twenty years ago, in spite of the work commenced by Hutton 

 and continued with rare skill and patience by Lyell, the dominant view of the 

 past history of the earth was catastrophic. Great and sudden physical 

 revolutions, wholesale creations and extinctions of living beings, were the 

 ordinary machinery of the geological epic brought into fashion by the mis 

 applied genius of Cuvier. It was gravely maintained and taught that the 

 end of every geological epoch was signalised by a cataclysm, by which every 

 living being on the globe was swept away, to be replaced by a brand-new 

 creation when the world returned to quiescence. A scheme of nature which 



