hdii PREFATORY REMARKS 



this representative of chaos and old night, — filled only with 

 strange rudimentary beings, framed after a pattern unknown 

 to living nature, or to any of the successive geological epochs ? 

 Must our reason conquer our imagination so far as to believe 

 in this? Or may we not be permitted to ask if the mental 

 process would not be exactly reversed? In order to be able 

 to believe it, must not imagination have wholly conquered 

 reason ! 



And were those odd uncomfortable creatures governed by 

 laws different from those which have obtained ever since ? 

 For, otherwise, how could the transmutation of species be 

 made more manifest in them than in those with which we are 

 acquainted ? But if the laws of nature have not changed, — - 

 if their attribute is to remain constant and invariable, — then 

 it is not easy to perceive any necessity for such pre-geological 

 strata, seeing that we ought to be able to turn for a demonstra- 

 tion equally complete, to the things around us. There is surely 

 something egregiously false in a theory which has both to sup- 

 plant real by supposititious facts, and to come into collision with 

 that attribute of law without which man's reason would be 

 useless and his researches vain. And it must be remem- 

 oered that Mr Darwin confesses, with an incomprehensible 

 candour, that these imaginations are not mere outworks of his 

 theory, which he can afford to have struck off, but that they 

 are absolutely essential to it We may be permitted here par- 

 ticularly to call the attention of the reader to that part of the 

 " Foot-prints" entitled " The Bearing of the Experience Ar- 

 gument," and likewise to that most pregnant passage in the 

 chapter following (p. 2iiQ\ beginning, " It is not true that 

 human observation has not been spread over a period suffi- 



