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Reviews— Fée’s Darwinisme. 309 
cal questions involved in the views he criticises may be inferred from 
his seriously urging as an objection to the Divergence of Character, 
that the universal germ, to which he traces back Darwin’s progeni- 
tors of the animal and vegetable series, must have contained all 
subsequent forms, since they would all, despite their differences of 
form and capabilities, have been derived from it; just as the germ 
of the individual contains only one embryo. Such a statement of 
abandoned Evolution Notions was scarcely to be anticipated in a 
member of the Medical Faculty of Strasburg. In any criticism of 
Darwin’s work, the evidence derived from geology ought to hold a . 
prominent place; but our author hesitatingly admits, if he does ad- 
mit, the non-universality of the Deluge,—sees in the sharply separated 
faunas of the older rocks proof of the plurality of criginal forms,— 
and rests the immutability of species on their permanence since 
‘diluvial’ times, whatever they are. 
It is not, however, to the physiological and geological inaccuracies 
of M. Fée that we would now direct attention, but to the serious 
error of representing Mr. Darwin’s views as pointing to a progression 
of which ‘ perfection’ is the goal. He imagines that the perfection 
to which, according to the views he opposes (not Darwin’s), organic 
forms are tending, is an ideal standard of beauty; and naturally asks, 
where is this standard to be found? ‘These notions are expanded 
in several rhetorical passages, neat in structure, but obscured by the 
loose way in which scientific terms are employed. Now, in the first 
place, Mr. Darwin is, for the reasons acutely pointed out by Sir C. 
Lyell in his ‘ Antiquity of Man,’ very cautious in his support of any 
theory of progression. ‘The most eloquent passages in his work are 
those in which he urges the fragmentary character of the geological 
record, on the assumed completeness of which alone could any scheme 
of progression be founded. And in the second place, by Perfection 
no more is meant than an ever-increasing accuracy of relation between 
the Organism and the Conditions under which it is placed. With 
Human Progression in a moral sense, no morphological theories have 
anything to do: it is only with Man as an animal, and his relations 
as such to other animals and to the inorganic world, that Zoology is 
concerned. To speak, therefore, of a period when esthetics shall so 
far prevail in the world that even the rose will lose its spines, and to 
suggest such millennial fancies as in any way flowing from the Dar- 
winian Theory, is grossly to misrepresent that theory, and to wander 
far from the true scope of scientific enquiry. 
Another error of nearly equal magnitude is to represent time as 
the only element of change. It is only one factor; the other is vary- 
ing conditions, meaning by that phrase not merely elimatal vicissi- 
tudes, and those less appreciable causes, loosely included under 
climate, which affect the spread of organisms even over districts 
contiguous to those whence they started,—but also competition, 
whether caused by quest of food, or by that desire of superiority, 
common, as John Hunter long ago pointed out, to all animals, alike 
to those which devour flesh and those which do not. Of the animals 
exposed to these hostile influences, only a certain proportion survive ; 
