72 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
followed a very different course, for neither of these men realised the 
significance of the idea which had come to him. Wells wrote that he had 
ventured to expound it, ‘ though at the hazard of its being thought rather 
fanciful than just,’ and Matthew half apologises for the amount of space 
which has been taken from his main subject. He was, nevertheless, 
anxious to claim credit when, twenty-nine years later, the importance of 
the discovery was revealed to him in the Gardener’s Chronicle reprint of 
the Times review of the Origin, the review of which Huxley said, ‘ I wrote 
it, I think, faster than I ever wrote anything in my life.’ It is interesting 
to speculate upon what might have happened if the author had called 
his book ‘ Arboriculture and Naval Timber’ instead of the more severely 
technical ‘ Naval Timber and Arboriculture’; for, with the former title, 
the work might well have been consulted by Darwin who would have 
been led by the table of contents to discover its significance. 
Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which 
appeared in 1844, undoubtedly includes illuminating thoughts far in 
advance of the time. Thus, more than once, the author writes of organic 
life ‘ pressing in’ when suitable conditions arose, ‘so that no place which 
could support any form of organic being might be left for any length of 
time unoccupied,’ and he also speaks of withdrawals when the appropriate 
conditions pass away. Then, too, Anton Dohrn’s ‘ Functionswechsel ’ 
is foreshadowed in the conclusion that ‘organs, while preserving a 
resemblance, are often put to different uses. For example: the ribs 
become, in the serpent, organs of locomotion, and the snout is extended, 
in the elephant, into a prehensile instrument.’ And, contrasted with this, 
the author points to the performance of the same functions by ‘ organs 
essentially different,’ and then to the consideration of rudimentary 
structures and the recognition that ‘ such curious features are most con- 
spicuous in animals which form links between various classes.’ Of great 
interest, too, is the forcible rebuke administered to those who maintain 
that an animal origin for man is a degrading thought. 
It was a credulous age and we need not be astonished at the author’s 
belief in a spontaneous, or as he preferred to call it, ‘ aboriginal,’ 
generation of clover in waste moss ground treated with lime, and his 
opinion that an explanation based on the presence of dormant or trans- 
ported seed was ‘extremely unsatisfactory’; or, again, his acceptance 
of the hypothesis, held by some authorities at the time, that parasitic 
entozoa were produced from ‘ particles of organised matter’ within the 
host, such a development being, he considered, ‘in no small degree 
favourable to the general doctrine of an organic creation by law.’ The 
authorship of the Vestiges was revealed in Alexander Ireland’s Intro- 
duction to the 12th edition, published in 1884, thirteen years after 
Chambers’ death. The secrecy appears to have been mainly due to a 
rule, laid down in the Chambers’ publishing business, that ‘ debateable 
questions in politics and theology ’ should be avoided. 
I have devoted some little time to the Vestiges, which I think has 
hardly received its due, although Darwin fully acknowledged its importance 
in preparing many minds for a belief in evolution. We know, too, that 
the author warmly supported the Darwinian cause in the controversy 
which arose over the Origin, and that it was his advocacy which rendered 
