AND THE BEGINNING OF REASON. 163 



supreme God, is a piece of elementary philosophy and 

 religion, which, I conceive, Sir, none of your corre- 

 spondents can have any wish to dispute ; but that the 

 writer of Genesis anticipated by his scientific knowledge 

 the epoch of Copernicus and Newton, Young and Fresnel , 

 Linnaeus, De Jussieu and Cuvier, is not only not proven 

 by the few simple phrases of his writings that have 

 anything remotely to do with the branches of science 

 which they so nobly illustrated ; much more than this, 

 it would be a disgrace and heavy imputation upon him 

 had he known all they believed, and yet expressed 

 himself so badly as to leave the world for thousands 

 of years in ignorance of the very germs of the true 

 theories, so obscurely that no one should ever have 

 dreamed that he was alluding to the true theories till 

 after they had been independently discovered. 



Your correspondent f X n ' will find both his pleasure 

 and his profit in reading the chapter on Instinct in 

 c Darwin's Origin of Species.' It will give him some 

 idea, I say not, how the reasoning faculty was first 

 acquired, but how it may have been gradually developed. 

 By a careful study of the same work he, and many 

 others who need the knowledge, will see that in accord- 

 ance with Darwinism the deterioration of a species is 

 quite possible. His quaintly expressed argument about 

 Adam's ' immediate progenitor' omits to notice that in 

 the moral world it is a step upward to become capable of 

 sinning, just as in the physical world it is a step upward 

 to become capable of dying, so that the wretchedest 

 man with reason is higher in the scale than the noblest 



M 2 



