136 DARWINIANA. 



other views of the same writers ; others, when carried 

 out, as incompatible with general experience or general 

 beliefs, and therefore as proving too much ; still 

 others, as proving nothing at all ; so that, on the 

 whole, the effect is rather confusing and disappoint- 

 ing. We certainly expected a stronger adverse case 

 than any which the thoroughgoing opposers of Dar- 

 win appear to have made out. Wherefore, if it be 

 found that the new hypothesis has grown upon our 

 favor as we 'proceeded, this must be attributed not 

 BO much to the force of the arguments of the book 

 itself as to the want of force of several of those by 

 which it has been assailed. Darwin's arguments we 

 might resist or adjourn ; but some of the refutations 

 of it give us more concern than the book itself did. 



These remarks apply mainly to the philosophical 

 and theological objections which have been elaborately 

 urged, almost exclusively by the American reviewers. 

 The North British reviewer, indeed, roundly de- 

 nounces the book as atheistical, but evidently deems 

 the case too clear for argument. The Edinburgh re- 

 viewer, on the contrary, scouts all such objections 

 as well he may, since he records his belief in " a 

 continuous creative operation," a constantly operating 

 secondary creation al law," through which species are 

 successively produced ; and he emits faint, but not 

 indistinct, glimmerings of a transmutation theory of 

 his own; 1 so that he is equally exposed to all the 



1 Whatever it may be, it is not " the homoeopathic form of the trans- 

 mutative hypothesis," as Darwin's is said to be (p. 252, American re- 

 print), so happily that the prescription is repeated in the second (p. 259) 

 and third (p. 271) dilutions, no doubt, on Hahnemann's famous princi- 



