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 a 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 ftxvour 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 jSt conditions the simplest organisms develope themselves into 

 relatively large and complex ones,"t 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. t "Genesis of Species," p. 249. 



