176 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



to the speculations of Ptolemy. But the planetary orbits 

 turned out to be not quite circular after all, and, grand as 

 was the service Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler and 

 Newton had to come after him. What if the orbit of Dar- 

 winism should be a little too circular I What if species 

 should offer residual phenomena, here and there, not 

 explicable by natural selection ? Twenty years hence 

 naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, 

 or is not, the case ; but in either event they will owe the 

 author of The Origin of Species an immense debt of gratitude. 

 We should leave a very wrong impression on the reader's 

 mind if we permitted him to suppose that the value of that 

 work depends wholly on the ultimate justification of the 

 theoretical views which it contains. On the contrary, 

 if they were disproved to-morrow, the book would still be 

 the best of its kind the most compendious statement of 

 well-sifted facts bearing on the doctrine of species that has 

 ever appeared. The chapters on Variation, on the Struggle 

 for Existence, on Instinct, on Hybridism, on the Imperfection 

 of the Geological Record, on Geographical Distribution, have 

 not only no equals, but, so far as our knowledge goes, no 

 competitors, within the range of biological literature. And 

 viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since the publi- 

 cation of Von Baer's Researches on Development, thirty 

 years ago, any work has appeared calculated to exert so 

 large an influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in 

 extending the domination of Science over regions of thought 

 into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated. 



