PHIL SO PHY OF RE VIE WERS. ! 7 7 



leria. From myriads of myriads of such primordial forms 

 we are invited to imagine trees of life perpetually springing 

 and developing multitudes of branches, protistic, animal, 

 vegetable, vertebrate, and so on, in some instances attain- 

 ing a higher, in others a lower grade, under the action of all 

 the laws which govern evolution, and so filling up the voids 

 caused by the disappearance of species, and always sub- 

 stituting the forms which possess the greatest fitness to 

 endure the varying changes in the conditions of the earth." 

 "Is it not a poem of nature written on the face of the 

 creation for mankind to read ? For all these things that we 

 have seemed to dream about, are what any one who chooses 

 may see with his own bodily eyes" (!) 



" We cannot now speculate on the visions of the future 

 which such investigations set before the mind, but there is 

 much in the whole picture to provoke strange fantasies of 

 the impersonality of life, and to rouse vague thoughts of the 

 ultimate reconcilement of Pantheistic philosophy with the 

 Theistic idea." 



I am quite at a loss to understand the object any writer 

 can have in publishing such fallacies and vaguely-expressed 

 fancies. We may imagine anything ; but I do not believe 

 that such utterly groundless imaginings would at any pre- 

 vious time have found a place in a journal so serious as the 

 "Saturday." Clever writers cannot be prevented from 

 cutting strange intellectual capers, but it is a pity they do 

 not select some more lively subject than evolution of life. 

 It is tiresome to be told again and again that there is little 

 difference between a living and a lifeless thing and surely, 

 little wisdom can be extracted from the remark, that there 

 are differences in molecular structure (which no one can 



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