THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' 183 



assailed Dr. Young, the world has seen no such specimen of 

 the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as 

 this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact 

 of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of 

 expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn 

 as a " flighty " person, who endeavours " to prop up his utterly 

 rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose " mode of 

 dealing with nature " is reprobated as " utterly dishonourable 

 to Natural Science." And all this high and mighty talk, which 

 would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, 

 proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of con- 

 science, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to 

 Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, " Is it credible that all favour- 

 able varieties of turnips are tending to become men ; " who is 

 so ignorant erf paleontology, that he can talk of the " flowers 

 and fruits " of the plants of the carboniferous epoch ; of com- 

 parative anatomy, that he can gravely affirm the poison appa- 

 ratus of the venomous snakes to be " entirely separate from 

 the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves ;" 

 of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask, " what 

 advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into 

 which the blood can be evaporated ? " Nor does the reviewer 

 fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with 

 a little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling 

 of the history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, 

 and Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the 

 proviso that he cannot " consent to test the truth of Natural 

 Science by the word of Revelation ; " but, for all that, he 

 devotes pages to the exposition of his conviction that Mr. 

 Darwin's theory " contradicts the revealed relation of the 

 creation to its Creator," and is "inconsistent with the fulness 

 of his glory." 



If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the 'Origin 

 of Species ' to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time 



