BY MRS MILLER. lix, 



ciently extended to furnish the necessary data for testing the 

 development hypothesis." "We think the reader will not fail 

 to see that these passages apply at least as much to the 

 " Origin of Species" as to the " Vestiges of Creation," 



Furthermore, whether, with the " Vestiges," we adopt the 

 opinion that the principle of life originated in a single cell, 

 from which all subsequent life was evolved by the agency 

 of magnetism, or imagine, with Mr Darwin, some undisco- 

 vered matrix replete with progenitive forms of life, is of 

 little consequence, so far as a heresy against Christianity 

 and the immortality of the soul is concerned. I think we 

 may say likewise of both, as M. Agassiz asserts of the for- 

 mer in his admirable remarks on the "Foot-prints,"* that 

 they equally involve a heresy against the inductive philo- 

 sophy. To prove these three positions is, indeed, the ob- 

 ject of the "Foot-prints;" nor can wo see that the train 

 of reasoning therein expanded is at all impaired by any one 

 fact or fancy embodied in the work on the origin of spe- 

 cies. Yet, in so far as Mr Darwin bases his reasoning 

 on facts, and not on the absence of them, insomuch as it 

 embraces a series of observations on the elasticity of spe- 

 cies, or their capabilities of expanding into varieties, — an 

 elasticity with which the Creator has, for the wisest pur- 

 poses, endowed them, — -just in so far is Mr Darwin's work 

 a valuable acquisition to the natural historian. Neverthe- 



* M. Agassiz, in those remarks on the ''Foot-prints" and sketch of 

 the life of the author published in America, which we have thought 

 would prove very acceptable to the English reader, has acknowledged 

 his obligations to Sir David Brewster, and has borrowed largely from a 

 sketch by that distinguished philosopher, which appeared in the " North 

 British Review." 



