THE DARWINIAN HYPOTHESIS 125 



bird, in our example, would surely have renounced fish 

 dinners long before it had produced the least effect on leg 

 or neck. 



Since Lamarck's time almost all competent naturalists 

 have left speculations on the origin of species to such 

 dreamers as the author of the Vestiges, by whose well- 

 intentioned efforts the Lamarckian theory received its 

 final condemnation in the minds of all sound thinkers. 

 Notwithstanding this silence, however, the transmutation 

 theory, as it has been called, has been a " skeleton in the 

 closet " to many an honest zoologist and botanist who 

 had a soul above the mere naming of dried plants and 

 skins. Surely, has such an one thought, nature is a mighty 

 and consistent whole, and the providential order established 

 in the world of life must, if we could only see it rightly, be 

 consistent with that dominant over the multiform shapes 

 of brute matter. But what is the history of astronomy, 

 of all the branches of physics, of chemistry, of medicine, 

 but a narration of the steps by which the human mind has 

 been compelled, often sorely against its will, to recognize 

 the operation of secondary causes in events where ignorance 

 beheld an immediate intervention of a higher power ? And 

 when we know that living things are formed of the same 

 elements as the inorganic world, that they act and react 

 upon it, bound by a thousand ties of natural piety, is ft 

 probable, nay is it possible, that they, and they alone, 

 should have no order in their seeming disorder, no unity 

 in their seeming multiplicity, should suffer no explanation 

 by the discovery of some central and sublime law of mutual 

 connexion ? 



Questions of this kind have assuredly often arisen, but it 

 might have been long before they received such expression 

 as would have commanded the respect and attention of 

 the scientific world, had it not been for the publication 

 of the work which prompted this article. Its author, Mr. 

 Darwin, inheritor of a once celebrated name, won his 

 spurs in science when most of those now distinguished 

 were young men, and has for the last 20 years held a 

 place in the front ranks of British philosophers. After a 

 circumnavigatory voyage, undertaken solely for the love 

 of his science, Mr. Darwin published a series of researches 

 which at once arrested the attention of naturalists and 

 geologists ; his generalizations have since received ample 

 confirmation, and now command universal assent, nor is 



