THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY NATURAL SELECTION. 9 



consist in? To form any conception of it is beyond human 

 understanding, and even the imagination can but form a dim 

 and vague notion of it. The Buddhist doctrine of the me- 

 tempsychosis cuts the matter short by supposing supreme 

 happiness to consist in absorption into the essence of the 

 Deity, after a long series of transmigrations beginning with 

 a worm, and rising to the dignity of a white elephant and 

 a king — a solution which is probably as intelligible as Dr. 

 Johnson's definition, which makes perfection an attribute of 

 the Deity ; which is but getting rid of an insuperable diffi- 

 culty by taking refuge in the imagination. Even the Bud- 

 dhist euthanasia w^ould provide only for the highest members 

 of the scale, leaving the rest of living creation to pursue the 

 struggle for life until the turn of all came, when the earth 

 would, of course, be without inhabitants. 



A great geologist and naturalist. Sir Charles Lyell, fancies 

 that he sees in the origin and development of languages a 

 corroboration of the Darwinian theory.* The hypothesis on 

 which this view is founded is of recent German origin, and 

 supposes languages, like the prototypes of the theory — the 

 development of species by natural selection — to have been 

 originally few in number, and that from these few have come 

 the multitude of tongues now found to exist, and which have 

 existed in every authentic period of history. The very 

 reverse of this hypothesis is the fact, and it is not in the 

 nature of things that it should be otherwise. The framing of 

 a language is an operation as factitious as the fashioning of a 

 club, the kindling of fire, or the conversion of a stone into 

 a cutting instrument. When man first appeared he was as 

 destitute of articulate speech as he was of these objects, the 

 mere works of his hands and brain ; and he had to compose a 

 language, at first rude and scanty, corresponding with the 

 paucity of his ideas, as he had to fabricate rude tools and 

 weapons. 



Languages, instead of being few in number, must have been 



* ' The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks ou 

 the Origin of Species.' By Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., F.R.S. 



