IN ITS EMBRYONIC STATE. f>61 



to time, in accordance with the scientific elevation of their se- 

 veral departments, or just as discoveries and anatomical inves- 

 tigations have increased, and rendered some other position of 

 the objects a matter of necessity." An interesting piece of 

 evidence this ; but certainly rather simple as a confession. It 

 will be found that, while whatever gives value to the " Phy- 

 vsio-Philosophy" of the German professor (a work which, if 

 divested of all the inspired bits, would be really a good one) 

 was acquired either before or since its first appearance in the 

 ordinary way, its development hypothesis came direct from 

 the god. Further, as I have already had occasion to state, 

 Oken holds, like Lamarck and Maillet, by the universal ocean 

 of Leibnitz : he holds also, that the globe is a vast crystal, 

 just a little flawed in the facets ; and that the three granitic 

 components, — quartz, feldspar, and mica, — are simply the 

 hail-drops of heavy stone showers that shot athwart the ori- 

 ginal ocean, and accumulated into rock at the bottom, as snow 

 or hail shoots athwart the upper atmosphere, and accumulates, 

 in the form of ice, on the summits of high hills, or in the 

 arctic or antarctic regions. Such, in the present day, are the 

 geological notions of Oken ! They were doubtless all pro- 

 mulgated in what is modestly enough termed " a kind of in- 

 spiration ;" and there are few now so ignorant of Geology as 

 not to know that the possessing agent in the case, — for inspi- 

 ration is not quite the proper word, — must have been at least 

 of kin to that ingenious personage who volunteered of old to 

 be a lying spirit in the mouths of the four hundred prophets. 

 And the well-known fact, that the most popular contempo- 

 rary expounder of Oken's hypothesis, — ^the author of the 

 " Yestiges," — has in every edition of his work been correct- 

 ing, modifying, or altogether withdrawing his statements re- 

 garding both geological and zoological phenomena, and that 

 his gradual development as a geologist and zoologist, from 

 the sufficiently low type of acquirement to which his first edi- 



