DARWINISM. 21 



Travel over the globe, and every country will present 

 you with some new species; distant rivers, distant 

 islands, in the ocean shallows separated by great deeps, 

 the opposite sides of a continent, the twin sides of a 

 mountain chain, the foot, the spur, the knee, the breast, 

 the snow-clad head of an Alpine range, will all present 

 you with their own peculiar forms of life. And how 

 came they there? Created, some will say, in those 

 regions and for those regions, because of their special 

 adaptation to them. Yet, since the globe has been 

 inhabited, vast tracts of it have changed their climates 

 from tropical heat to frozen gloom, and again, yielded 

 the thick-ribbed ice to genial suns and fragrant zephyrs. 

 Unhappy species, the creatures of a fixed idea, created 

 for the temperate meridian of Devonshire, and con- 

 demned by the thoughtlessness of nature, to pass their 

 lives in a climate like that of Nova Zembla ! 



But further, had each species been assigned to its 

 station as some suppose, by a single act of creation, is 

 it not reasonable, does not reverence require us to expect, 

 that each species would have been best oif in its own 

 station? But this is not the case. On the contrary, 

 imported species of plants and animals often thrive pro- 

 digiously in their new habitat, and over-run it. 



Once more, we find in numberless plants and animals 

 rudimentary organs that are of no use to the possessors, 

 mammse, that give no milk ; pistils, in male florets ; 

 in insects wings too small for flight, and soldered to the 

 wing cases ; the fifth toe in the hind-foot of the dog ; 

 the spur of the hen ; the wing of the Apteryx ; and the 



