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offspring. " Bricks without straw," were a facile opera- 

 tion, by comparison. It is, without doubt, true, that, 

 were the sow as well discipline.4 in habits of thought, 

 as have been those of her brethren who have "trod 

 the boards;" and, were she to devote her accom- 

 plishments to the study of Herbert Spencer's " First 

 Principle," she might (were no aberration of her 

 cerebral or reproductive system, to follow therefrom) 

 learn the trick (even were she the mould of form so 

 dear to an English pork-breeder's heart) of how to 

 evolve, by a necessary law, a homogeneity of fat, into 

 that heterogeneity of adipose tissue, yclept a Pig. 

 Herbert Spencer is immeasurably more astute than 

 is Darwin, in his exposition of the processes of evolu- 

 tion. When improvements occur, Darwin, with a sim- 

 plicity, born of little knowledge of the cavils in which 

 some people unkindly indulge, ascribes them to " in- 

 nate tendency," to "spontaneous variability;" a course, 

 which at once discloses, that such terms are but the 

 counters for ignorance. Not so Herbert Spencer. 

 Herbert Spencer explains the improvements, by re- 

 ferring them to a law which lies on the uttermost 

 verge of the domain of the Knowable; which he 

 terms " the instability of the homogeneous," by which 

 a "differentiation" ever results, from "a state of homo- 

 geneity," into " a state of heterogeneity." The beauty 

 of this explanation lies in the circumstance, that his 

 disciples, by the time that they have acquired a faint 

 glimmering of the meaning of his terms, are so com- 

 pletely exhausted, that they have not even a grain 

 of cerebral phosphorus left, with which to gauge the 



