mtir $rfri;etos. [xn. 



turned out to be not quite circular after all, and, grand 

 as was the service Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler 

 and Newton had to come after him. What if the orbit 

 of Darwinism should be a little too circular ? What if 

 species should offer residual phaenomena, here and there, 

 not explicable by natural selection 1 Twenty years hence 

 naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, or 

 is not, the case ; but in either event they will owe the 

 author of "The Origin of Species" an immense debt of 

 gratitude. We should leave a very wrong impression on 

 the reader's mind if we permitted him to suppose that 

 the value of that work depends wholly on the ultimate 

 justification of the theoretical views which it contains. 

 On the contrary, if they were disproved to-morrow, the 

 book would still be the best of its kind the most com- 

 pendious statement of well-sifted facts bearing on the 

 doctrine of species that has ever appeared. The chapters 

 on Variation, on the Struggle for Existence, on Instinct, 

 on Hybridism, on the Imperfection of the Geological 

 Record, on Geographical Distribution, have not only no 

 equals, but, so far as our knowledge goes, no competitors, 

 within the range of biological literature. And viewed as 

 a whole, we do not believe that, since the publication of 

 Von Baer's Researches on Development, thirty years ago, 

 any work has appeared calculated to exert so large an 

 influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in ex- 

 tending the domination of Science over regions of thought 

 Into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated. 



