160 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



those phenomena of hybridization which are exhibite<y>y 

 many species when crossed with other species. On the 

 other hand, not only is it not proved that all species give 

 rise to hybrids infertile inter se, but there is much reason 

 to believe that, in crossing, species exhibit every gradation 

 from perfect sterility to perfect fertility. 



Such are the most essential characteristics of species. 

 Even were man not one of them a member of the same 

 system and subject to the same laws the question of 

 their origin, their causal connexion, that is, with the other 

 phenomena of the universe, must have attracted his 

 attention, as soon as his intelligence had raised itself above 

 the level of his daily wants. 



Indeed history relates that such was the case, and has 

 embalmed for us the speculations upon the origin of living 

 beings, which were among the earliest products of the 

 dawning intellectual activity of man. In those early days 

 positive knowledge was not to be had, but the craving 

 after it needed, at all hazards, to be satisfied, and according 

 to the country, or the turn of thought of the speculator, 

 the suggestion that all living things arose from the mud 

 of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from some more anthro- 

 pomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient resting-place for his 

 curiosity. The myths of Paganism are as dead as Osiris 

 or Zeus, and the man who should revive them, in opposition 

 to the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to 

 scorn ; but the coeval imaginations current among the 

 rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers whose 

 very name and age are admitted by every scholar to be 

 unknown, have unfortunately not yet shared their fate, 

 but, even at this day, are regarded by nine-tenths of the 

 (i\i!i/(d world as the authoritative standard of fact and 

 the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions, in all 

 that relates to the origin of things, and, among them, of 

 species. In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of 

 modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi- 

 barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and 

 the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the 

 patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of 

 (ialileo unlil now, whose lives have been embittered and 

 their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Biblio- 

 laters ? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose 

 sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonize 



