420 Rev. S. Haughton on the Origin of Species. 



morum, so that five cells could be made of less wax than that 

 which now makes only four, instead of fifty-one out of fifty. 



Notwithstanding this conclusive decision in favour of the 

 mathematicians, the advocates of final cause, and those who 

 maintain that economy of wax can create a new species, have 

 both persisted in using the bees' cell in illustration of their re- 

 spective theories, with a pertinacity that proves the persistent 

 vitality of an exploded theory. In illustration of this remark- 

 able tendency of false theories to reproduce themselves, I shall 

 here add, as an appendix to my account of the form of the 

 wasps' and bees' cells, some remarks on the origin of species, 

 the substance of which originally appeared in the ' Natural His- 

 tory Review ' of 1860. 



Appendix on the Origin of Species. 



The active and restless mind of man has never been content 

 with the knowledge of the present, but has always sought to 

 know the future and the past. The guesses of the ancients as 

 to the future of man are amongst the most interesting and, at 

 the same time, the most puerile of their philosophical specula- 

 tions. The reader of the Tusculan Disputations rises from his 

 task, charmed by the style of the writer, but thankful that a 

 certain revelation of the future renders him immeasurably su- 

 perior in knowledge to the weavers of these pleasant webs of 

 fiction ; and though he admires the skill of the ingenious sophists 

 who live again and dispute in the pages of Cicero, he would not 

 for an instant exchange his own position for theirs. 



The moderns have resolved, by their speculations on the past, 

 to show that in ingenuity and oddness of conceit, and, probably, 

 also in wideness from the truth, they are in no respect inferior 

 to the ancients. The future being shut out from us, we are re- 

 solved to try what we can effect, in proof of our versatility of 

 imagination, by guessing at the history of the past. 



To establish a character for subtlety and skill, in drawing 

 large conclusions on this subject from slender premises, the first 

 requisite is ignorance of what other speculators have attempted 

 before us in the same field ; and the second is, a firm confidence 

 in our own special theory. Neither of these requisites can be 

 considered wanting in those who are engaged in the task of 

 reproducing Lamarck's theory of organic life, either as alto- 

 gether new, or with but a tattered and threadbare cloak thrown 

 over its original nakedness. 



The sciences of geology and political economy are mainly 

 answerable for the revival of these exploded and forgotten 

 fancies, — geology, in supplying the lost history of organic life, 

 which could never be studied profoundly from the creatures 



