160 DARWINIANA. 



far back. Yet one interposition admits the principle 

 as well as more. Interposition presupposes particular 

 necessity or reason for it, and raises the 'question, when 

 and how often it may have been necessary. It might 

 be the natural supposition, if we had only one set of 

 species to account for, or if the successive inhabitants 

 of the earth had no other connections or resemblances 

 than those which adaptation to similar conditions, 

 which final causes in the narrower sense, might ex- 

 plain. But if this explanation of organic Nature re- 

 quires one to "believe that, at innumerable periods 

 in the earth's history, certain elemental atoms have 

 been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues," 

 and this when the results are seen to be strictly con- 

 nected and systematic, we cannot wonder that such 

 interventions should at length be considered, not as 

 interpositions or interferences, but rather to use the 

 reviewer's own language as " exertions so frequent 

 and beneficent that we come to regard them as the or- 

 dinary action of Him who laid the foundation of the 

 earth, and without whom not a sparrow falleth to the 

 ground." 1 



"What does the difference between Mr. Darwin and 

 his reviewer now amount to ? If we say that accord- 

 ing to one view the origination of species is natural, 

 according to the other miraculous, Mr. Darwin agrees 

 that " what is natural as much requires and presup- 

 poses an intelligent mind to render it so that is, to 

 effect it continually or at stated times as what is su- 

 pernatural does to effect it for once."* He merely 



1 North American Review for April, 1860, p. 606. 

 8 Vide motto from Butler, prefixed to the second edition of Darwin's 

 work. 



