Auckland Institute. 445 
one of a rather singular character, marked throughout by lines of thought 
not usually found in books of purely scientific discussion. Its object as 
stated by himself is, “to maintain the position that ‘ Natural Selection’ 
acts, and indeed must act; but that still, in order to account for the 
production of known kinds of animals and plants, it requires to be sup- 
plemented by the action of some other natural law or laws as yet undis- 
covered. Also, that the consequences that have been drawn from Evolution, 
whether exclusively Darwinian or not, to the prejudice of religion, by no 
means follow from it, and are in fact illigitimate.”* In maintaining these 
positions, he has brought forward some very unexpected witnesses, not against 
the doctrine of all or any of the varied forms of life having been evolved from 
earlier forms by the continued operation of a natural law, but in favour of it. 
He cites St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Cornelius à Lapide, and the Jesuit 
Suarez, the eminent casuist of the Spanish School, for the positions that “in 
the first institution of nature we do not look for Miracles, but for the laws of 
Nature,” and that terrestrial animals were created, not immediately, but 
“ potentially only, the kinds of which time would afterwards bring forth.” 
And, singularly enough, he maintains, by the aid of these novel witnesses 
in favour of the results of modern research, that the views even of the 
abiogenesists, so energetically maintained by Dr. Bastian, that life may be 
produced from inorganic matter without the presence of any living germ, and 
“that under fit conditions the simplest organisms develope themselves into 
relatively large and complex ones,”+ are perfectly consistent with orthodox 
(Catholic) theology. But while admitting these apparently greater postulates, 
he strenuously objects to the sufficiency of the theory of natural selection to 
account for the derivation of species and especially to its having any share in 
that great development of some of the members of the order of primates, 
which has resulted in the appearance of men upon the earth. He insists upon 
the immense numerical chances against the survival of a variety, even the 
_ most favourable to the individual in the struggle for existence, if such 
variation should be produced only in single or in very few individuals in the 
presence of a great majority of a less favoured type. Again, he urges, and 
rather exaggerates the well-known arguments brought forward by Sir William 
Thomson, and established by him by transcendent mahematical analyses 
based on three different sets of physical hypotheses, by which he considers that 
he has proved that the world cannot have existed in its present condition 
suitable to the maintenance of animal life for more than “some such period as 
one hundred millions of years,” and he labours to show that such a period 
would be insufficient for the phenomena on the Darwinian hypothesis ; both 
of which propositions, I need hardly say, are in a high degree doubtful, as has 
* Genesis of Species,” p- 5. + “Genesis of Species,” p. 249, 
