The Zoologist— July, 1868. 1287 



matter as they have thought it out. A zealous divine may feel very irate 

 with Colenso or with Darwin, but he cannot dash off such a sixpenny 

 tract after dinner as the world will be content to receive as a satis- 

 factory reply. Mr. Wollaslon sees this, and without making Dar- 

 winism a prominent object, either to attack or defend, shows us how 

 deeply he has been impressed with the magnitude of the question, and 

 how exhaustive has been the research he has devoted to its con- 

 sideration. 



Mr. Wollaston, in his ' Coleoplera Atlantidum,' avows the opinion 

 that if a once-continuous tract of land were broken up by some 

 natural catastrophe, and the insect forms which once overrun the 

 whole, were thus divided into separate assemblages, the inevitable 

 consequence would be a certain amount of external modification con- 

 sequent upon the change. 



Suppose, for instance, some vast continent, as the favourite Atlanta 

 of geologists, were submerged and became the Atlantic ocean, a few 

 mountain peaks or desert flats only remaining visible, as now ex- 

 emplified in the Madeiras, Canaries, Cape Verdes and Azores, 

 Mr. Wollaston feels it would require no stretch of the imagination to 

 conclude " that a very large majority of such minute insular departures 

 from a central form as those which we now meet with, would have 

 resulted as a matter of course; and would have been rapidly matured 

 from their respective types." 



That these modifications or departures do occur no entomologist 

 who has studied Mr. Wollaston's works or the insects he has described 

 will for a moment doubt, but the word "rapidly" will rivet their 

 attention, especially where the Lamarckian proclivity has once taken 

 root in the mind. Mr. Wollaston perceives this, and adds the 

 following explanatory remarks : — 



" I say rapidly matured, because I have no reason to think that the 

 small insular modifications to which I refer are the product of that 

 slowly accumulating infinitesimal divergence, in a given uniform 

 direction, which certain modern theories would suppose to be un- 

 ceasingly going on throughout indefinite time, but which seems to me, 

 in nine cases out of every assumed ten, to have no existence in the 

 feral world. Such a process may occasionally be kept up by the per- 

 severing intervention of a true controlling cause, such as that which is 

 implied by the skill and intellect of man; but we have no evidence 

 that 'nature' (whatever the term may mean) is able to accomplish a 

 task thus difficult, and which requires not only sagacity and design, 



