BY THE HEV. CANON TEISIKAM. 17 



embryology alone, this has doubtless shed unsuspected light on 

 the problem, but it is not all. Prof. Huxley wag happy in his 

 demonstration of the modification of the palatal bones in birds as 

 a key to classification, but taken alone the system is unsatisfactory, 

 for many other factors come in and affect the correlation of one 

 portion of the structure to the others. Every department of the 

 specialist supplies some indications of the true line of classifica- 

 tion. Yet neither embryologist, pterylologist, oologist, histologist, 

 comparative anatomist, or geographical naturalist, can, for exam- 

 ple, in the matter of ornithological classification, say to his fellow 

 "I have no need of thee." In the present stage of our scientific 

 knowledge no specialist ought to venture to propound a theory 

 which he is not at once ready to admit may be modified by the 

 results of wholly independent investigations arrived at from a 

 very different standpoint. But the clanger of the specialist's 

 dogmatism is that he is tempted to unlimited speculation of every 

 thing outside his own province. I may take as an illustration of 

 this the reckless and baseless postulates of Haeckel in what he 

 ventures to term his History of Creation. A careful and accurate 

 investigator of the lower forms of life and of embryology, he 

 forms his theories, and then generalizing he postulates anything 

 in time, and anything in space, utterly regardless of records geo- 

 logical or physical, and without a scintilla of proof, takes them 

 as granted axioms, because without them he cannot form his 

 theory of the evolutions either of man or of the lower animals. 

 In marked contrast with these wild and visionary dreams is the 

 modest suggestion of theories following the admission of facts of 

 the two men who have done most in the last twenty years to 

 found the new school of naturalists, Darwin and Wallace. A.s 

 regards the former there can be no doubt of the view to which 

 Mr. Darwin strongly inclines. - Opposed as I am myself to return 

 any other verdict than that of "non-proven" to his theory, if 

 carried out to the hitter end, yet I can nowhere find in his writ- 

 ings any dogmatic assertions, or any claim for more than what 

 no one can reasonably refuse, that his doctrine should be calmly 

 weighed and tested. Take for instance the relationship of all 

 plants and animals as springing from simple germs. But these 



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