588 MODERN METHODS OF SCIENCE. 
natural selection, which, as we had thought, died out with Lamarck 
fifty years ago. 
In Darwin we have one of those philosophers whose great 
knowlédge of animal and vegetable life is only transcended by 
his imagination. In fact, he is to be regarded more as a metaphy- 
sician with a highly-wrought imagination than as a scientist, al- 
though a man having a most wonderfal knowledge of the facts of 
natural history. 
In England and America we find scientific men of the profound- 
est intellects differing completely in regard to his logic, analogies 
and deductions ; in Germany and France the same thing —in the 
former of these countries some speeulators saying that ‘ his theo- 
ry is our starting-point” and in France many of her best scientific 
men not ranking the labors of Darwin with those of pure science. 
Darwin takes up the law of life and runs it into progressive 
development. In doing this he seems to me to increase the embar- 
rassment which surrounds us on looking into the mysteries of cre- 
ation. He is not satisfied to leave the laws of life where he finds 
them, or to pursue their study by logical and inductive reasoning. 
His method of reasoning will not allow him to remain at rest; he 
must be moving onward in his unification of the universe. He 
started with the lower orders of animals, and brought them through 
their various stages of progressive development until he supposed 
he had touched the confines of man; he then seems to have re- 
coiled, and hesitated to pass the boundary which separated man 
m the lower orders of animals; but he saw that all hjs previous 
logic was bad if he stopped there, so man was made from the ` 
ape (with which no one can find fault, if the descent be legiti- 
mate). This stubborn logic pushes him still farther, and he must 
find some connecting link with that most remarkable property 
of the human face called expression; so his ingenuity bas given 
us a very curious and readable treatise on that subject. Yet still 
another step must be taken in this linking together man and the 
lower orders of animals; it is in connection with language; and 
before long it is- not unreasonable to expect another production 
from that most wonderful and ingenious intellect on the connec- 
tion between the language of man and the brute creation. 
~ Let us see for a moment to what this reasoning from anal- 
ogy would lead us, if applied to chemical science, which mvt 
