IN ITS EMBRYONIC STATE. 249 



" Admitting," he remarks, " that we see not now any such 

 fact as the production of new species, we at least know, that 

 while such facts were occurring upon earth, there were as- 

 sociated phenomena in progress of a character perfectly ordi- 

 nary. For example, when the earth received its first fishes, 

 sandstone and limestone were forming in the manner exem- 

 plified a few years ago in the ingenious experiments of Sir 



life of the old Greek philosopher, are not unworthy of being studied, as 

 curiously illustrative of the cycle of thought. Epicurus, I must, how- 

 ever, first remind the reader, in the words of his biographer, "supposed 

 that men, and aU other animals, were originally produced by the ground. 

 According to him, the primitive earth was fat and nitrous ; and the sun, 

 gradually warming it, soon covered it with herbage and shrubs : there 

 also began to arise on the surface of the ground a great number of small 

 tumours like mushrooms, which having in a certain time come to matu- 

 rity, the skin burst, and there came forth little animals, which, gradually 

 retiring from the place where they were produced, began to respire." 

 And there can be little doubt that, had the microscope been a discovery 

 of early Greece, the passage here would have told us, not of mushroom- 

 like tumours, but of monads. Save that the element of microscopic fact 

 is awanting in the one and present in the other, the following are strictly 

 parallel lines of argument : — 



" To the natural objection that " In the first place, there is no 

 the earth does not now produce reason to suppose that, though life 

 men, lions, and dogs, Epicurus re- had been imparted by natural 

 plies that the fecundity of the earth means, after the first cooling of the 

 is now exhausted. In advanced surface to a suitable temperament, 

 age a woman ceases to bear chil- it would continue thereafter to be 

 dren ; a piece of land never before capable of being imparted in like 

 cultivated produces much more manner. The great work of the 

 during the few first years than it peopling of this globe with living 

 does afterwards ; and when a forest species is mainly a fact accom- 

 is once cut down, the soil never plished : the highest known species 

 produces trees equal to those which came as a crowning effort thousands 

 have been rooted up. Those which of years ago. The work being thus 

 are afterwards planted become to all appearance finished, we are 

 dwarfish, and are perpetually de- not necessarily to expect that the 

 generating. We are, however, he origination of life and of species 

 argues, by no means certain but should be conspicuously exemplified 

 ihere may be at present rabbits, in the present day. We are rather 



