Notices of New Books. 7593 



with the idea of irnpeifection, and imperfection is not compatible with 

 our notions of creation as delivered from the hands of the Creator. 



Without at all agreeing with Mr. Darwin, we would suggest that 

 the history of man upon the earth seems to be parallel with what he 

 supposes has gone before us, race struggling with race, some getting 

 ''"the mastery, the stronger extinguishing the weaker; then, culminating, 

 and perhaps becoming unwieldly by their size, and trying to include 

 too great a diversity of compounds, break up into distinct nations, 

 isolated from each other by some peculiar character (as instanced in 

 the recent severance of the United States) which, though of advantage 

 to them separately, was incompatible in association. Each of the 

 3'^oung nations, at first, fill diflferent spheres; increase, multiply; and 

 as they may be of unequal strength, the more powerful outrun the 

 others ; the weakest are wholly extinguished, and those of middle 

 power, too weak to multiply and too strong to die, go dwindling on 

 from age to age as feeble communities, bringing down to posterity anti- 

 quated characters which have been quite lost in the subdivisions of the 

 more vigorous races into "modern nations," but to be wholly cut off only 

 when the dominant races take unusual strides in advance of them. 

 Every step in these changes would tend to some kind of improvement, 

 as no new quality could become dominant that did not confer some 

 advantage on its possessor ; the feeble and small-numbered races of 

 the world, termed aboriginal, would bear a sort of analogy to those 

 brute genera, as the Ornithorhynchus, Apteryx, Dodo, &c., which have 

 become or are becoming extinct ; and a parallelism might even be 

 drawn between the monumental remains of extinct nations and the 

 fossilized ancestors (if such they be) of organic life. 



Now, it must be admitted that there are many striking points 

 of resemblance between these facts and what Mr. Darwin says he has 

 observed in the past history of organic life ; but we can scarcely 

 admit that the parallel resemblance is the result of genealogical affi- 

 nity between the brute creation and the human species ; and if a 

 special ci'eation is admitted for man, with his many points of sympathy 

 with the laws of lower organic life, the probability of special creation 

 lower in the scale of nature is at once admitted. However slightingly 

 Mr. Darwin may speak of " plans of creation " we do see general 

 parallelisms and a sympathy of design running through the whole system 

 of creation, not only between the different divisions of organic nature, 

 but in things which are necessarily disconnected ; and we ask whether 

 the resemblances occurring within the organic kingdoms may not be 

 attributable to this same uniformity of design rather than genealogical 

 VOL. XIX. 2 Q 



