THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' 



537 



and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as 

 " utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this 

 high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one 

 of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want 

 of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, 

 by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, 

 " Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are 

 tending to become men ; " who is so ignorant of paleontology, 

 that he can talk of the " flowers and fruits " of the plants of 

 the carboniferous epoch ; of comparative anatomy, that he 

 can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of the venomous 

 snakes to be "entirely separate from the ordinary laws of 

 animal life, and peculiar to themselves ; " of the rudiments 

 of physiology, that he can ask, " what advantage of life could 

 alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can 

 be evaporated ? " Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this 

 outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimu- 

 lation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the his- 

 tory of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and 

 Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso 

 that he cannot " consent to test the truth of Natural Sci- 

 ence by the word of Revelation ; " but, for all that, he 

 devotes pages to the exposition of his conviction that Mr. 

 Darwin's theory "contradicts the revealed relation of the 

 creation to its Creator," and is " inconsistent with the fulness 

 of his glory." 



If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the ' Origin 

 of Species ' to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time 

 of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish 

 and unmannerly as the ' Quarterly Review ' article, unless, 

 perhaps, the address of a Reverend Professor to the Dublin 

 Geological Society might enter into competition with it. But 

 a large proportion of Mr. Darwin's critics had a lamentable 

 resemblance to the * Quarterly ' reviewer, in so far as they 

 lacked either the will, or the wit, to make themselves masters 

 of his doctrine ; hardly any possessed the knowledge required 

 to follow him through the immense range of biological and 



