384 Literary Notices. 



LITERAEY NOTICES. 



The Darwinian Theory op the Transmutation of Species, 

 examined by a graduate op the university of cambridge. 

 (Nisbet and Co). — Cambridge has not been successful with her " Gra- 

 duate" who wrote this silly and impudent book. He has learnt 

 nothing of the art of thinking, though he has made some progress 

 in the trick of logic chopping, and in no part of his volume do we 

 trace any symptom of his understanding the theory he undertakes 

 to confute, and if, as we believe, he deserves to escape from the charge 

 of wilful misrepresentation, his acquittal will be founded upon the 

 evidence that he does not know enough of scientific facts and argu- 

 ments to be competent to give an intelligible and accurate account of 

 any important scientific work. His book begins with a statement 

 purely and obviously erroneous, that "in Mr. Darwin's theory the idea 

 of design in every form of organic life is steadfastly denied, and it 

 is asserted that all existing plants and animals have been produced 

 by slow changes, without any plan or intention, from some ante- 

 cedent forms." This wrongheaded passage may perhaps be con- 

 sidered as tantamount to the assertion that there can be no plan or 

 design in the creation of plants and animals subject to modification 

 under fixed laws, for that is all that Darwinism implies. The 

 " Graduate" is not original in this illogical notion, he has simply 

 followed the practice of a class of persons who continue to find 

 heresy in all science they do not understand, and who appeal — as 

 the Graduate does — to what they term " common sense," as a 

 convenient substitute for the accurate knowledge they have not the 

 inclination or the capacity to acquire. Darwin's view on this 

 subject is plain from the concluding remarks of his well-known 

 work, in which, alluding to his theory, he says " there is a grandeur 

 in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally 

 breathed by the Creator into a few forms or one, and that while this 

 planet has gone cycling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, 

 from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful, and most 

 wonderful, have been, and are being evolved." The theory of 

 Darwin rests upon probabilities, which may be strengthened or 

 overthrown, but whatever its ultimate fate in the belief of mankind, 

 it does not touch the question of design or no design, in the manner 

 supposed by the " Graduate," because no amount of action through 

 secondary causation can render less probable the existence of a pri- 

 mary cause. On the contrary, if the operation of those forces, which are 

 called secondary causes, can be shown to have led to harmonious and 

 admirable results through long cycles of ages, the quantity of evi- 

 dence in favour of plan and design is largely increased. An atheistic 

 philosophy, no doubt, requires some physical theory of the pro- 

 duction of organized beings, and it may, though not necessarily, 

 adopt a scheme of development and hereditary succession with 

 variation. If an animal sprang suddenly out of the earth, or were 

 formed by a rapid concourse of atoms before our eyes, the spectacle, 

 though contrary to experience, would not, in reality, be more won- 



