3176 Tue ZooLocist—Avetst, 1872. 
his style is at once elegant and forcible, and independently of the 
rather too ostentatious assumption that he, Dr. Bree, is right, and 
Mr. Darwin wrong,—a matter that I rather prefer to consider 
adhuc sub judice,—will be read with pleasure by those who agree 
with the writer. Being one of these,—entirely agreeing with Dr. 
Bree that there are “fallacies” in Darwinism, although I think it 
our duty to demonstrate rather than to assume this,—I have 
selected a passage which I think the best and most comprehensive 
in the volume before me. The reader will please to observe that 
I by no means assert that either the passage or the book exactly 
meets the case, for I think that, after both have been studied with 
care and with candour, Darwinism will remain for the present 
much where it is now. 
“As far as I am concerned, I would gladly accept any sound explanation 
of the modus operandi of God in Creation. My own opinion is that such 
knowledge is beyond the limits of human reason. That as we cannot 
realise a spiritual existence because we cannot compare it, so do I believe 
that the operations of Divinity are incomparable, and consequently that we 
cannot realise with our limited reason the incoming of species into the 
world. I place the grand event of man’s existence in the world in the 
same category of thought as the termination of space, the beginning and 
end of time, the indivisibility of matter, and the true nature of gravitation ; 
and while I admit and cherish the most extreme and recondite investiga- 
tions into the hidden mysteries of nature, I deny the right of any man to 
deal with such questions upon mere assumptions, illogical bases, and 
unsound deductions. ‘The system of Darwin is eminently illogical, and 
must fall.’ It is an hypothesis which draws large but unsound deductions 
from the rare and abnormal deviations, leaving the real field untouched and 
unexplored. It is founded upon the exceptions, not the rules, of nature. 
It is utterly opposed to design, to the teachings of animal mechanics, to 
the grand and beautiful and everlasting proofs upon which the teleologist 
loves to dwell. It is a cold, unsound, unphilosophic, degrading system of 
assumed probabilities, which, if true, would be ten times more wonderful 
than anything assumed or believed by the most strict and rigid disciple of 
special creation. Nay, still further, if proved in every point to be true, it 
would still leave the fact of special creation in all its wonderful mystery. 
The organic cannot be formed from the inorganic; nor could the organic, 
if it were so formed, be endowed by any physical force with the laws and 
properties of Lirz. Go on still in speculation, and I ask, whence the 
inorganic—its beginning, its ending, its grand and inexplicable layws— 
which the physicist in vain attempts to correlate with the vital? whence 
