Auckland Institute. 447 
investigations which he had been for many years engaged in making on the 
„Subject, and which were not then complete. 
Mr. Wallace has raised weighty objections* which seem to suggest a 
further expansion of the theory so as to make it embrace some occasional and 
apparently violent or, at all events, sudden changes which would appear at 
first sight to be interferences with the course of law or to be “ catastrophic,” 
but which Professor Huxley has demonstrated may, though only occurring at 
intervals, be as much a part of the uniform law as those which recur rapidly. 
Such difficulties and answers to them, more or less complete, are now 
agitating thinkers in every line of science ; for it is the striking character of 
these discussions, and a noble result of Mr. Darwin’s theory, that at last, after 
long pursuing divergent lines of investigation, all sciences are now meeting in 
front of this great question of the origin and development of life; the 
biologists and microscopists ardently disputing the possibility of its generation 
from inorganic matter ; the anatomists investigating the mysterious functions 
of the brain and the curious facts of embryology ; the palæontologist, the 
geologist and the botanist tracing up forms of life to the primitive type, and 
physiologists in common with metaphysicians labouring to the same end, 
seeking to obtain some notion of the action of will, mind, or spirit upon 
matter, or to ascertain if there be any real distinction between them. 
Astronomy and meteorology too have been brought to bear on the question, 
especially in the curious meteoric hypothesis suggested by Sir William 
Thomson, and Mr St. George Mivart’s book affords a curious proof that this 
universal stirring of the mind has reached even to these tranquil regions of 
thought in which labours of the great scholastic philosophers of the middle 
ages and of the casuists who followed them usually repose. 
I do not like leaving the subject without some reference to the reactions 
to which by an inevitable law of nature the great advances in thought made 
in our day have given rise; every sudden outburst of new light has produced a 
darkening effect in some quarters ; and the eras of advance in the world have 
ever been marked by the wildest outbreaks of ignorance and superstition. A 
poet of the end of the last century says,— 
‘* As Phebus to the world, is science to the soul, 
And reason now through number, time, and space 
Darts the keen lustre of her serious eye.” 
And he then proceeds to rejoice in the victory he supposes to be gained over 
superstition. 
The triumph was premature ; the advance in science indeed, since Beattie’s 
day, has been far greater than he could have foreseen, but credulity has not 
diminished but has only shifted its ground, and seems rather to increase with 
* Wallace’s “Natural Selection,” pp. 332-342. 
