REVIEWS. 



405 



everyone is not yet embued with Darwinian doctrines; and indeed of 

 those that are there are many not honest enough, or too timid to confess their 

 faith. No doubt it is safer and more prudent to go in the highway of the world, 

 and to follow the ordinary traffic, even in science. 



For our part, we are rather erratic, and being good pedestrians, we jump 

 over a fence, step over a style, take footpaths in preference to turnpikes, and 

 have more than once lost ourselves in a wood. It is true by so doing we have 

 suffered some inconveniences, we could not always find an auberge when we 

 wanted refreshment, we have more than once been attacked by thieves, been 

 benighted, and have met with other mishaps ; but then we have often been 

 rewarded with such glorious views from the hill top, such picturesque scenes 

 in dell and valley, that the advantages of freshness, truth and beauty, have 

 far outbalanced all evils, and we are as ready as ever to take the chance of a 

 deviation, as if we knew not of attendant inconveniences. 



Mr. Page takes the more legitimate roads, and will consequently avoid many 

 of the scrapes into which we might have got, had we attempted what he has done. 



" In attempting this (botanical) arrangement, numerous varied and complex as 

 vegetable life may at first sight appear, the botanist has happily a few great fixed 

 principles in nature to guide him ; type and order run unswervingly throughout 

 the whole : and though the Creator might easily have constructed each species 

 after its own type, and rendered plants as varied in their individual forms, as 

 they are numerically abundant, yet He has thought fit to restrict himself, as it 

 were, to a few types, and humanly speaking, like a skilful inventor to pro- 

 duce an almost endless variety from the co-adaption of a few simple elements 

 and complexity of design by the elimination of a few primal patterns. As in- 

 numerable hues can be produced from a few primitive colours, as endless strains 

 of music flow from the touches of a few simple words, or as the ideas of all 

 times and nations can be expressed by the combinations of some twenty 

 or thirty letter-sounds ; so in the structure of animals and plants every 

 variety of form, every conceivable adaptation of structure, proceeds from 

 the modification of a few elementary forms and types in nature. Without this 

 uniformity of plan and design, the study of nature by man's limited faculties 

 would have been impossible. In summing up the co-adaptations of the flora 

 and fauna, these are the views which the author takes : " Perfect as the exist- 

 ing flora and fauna may appear each in its own proper line, they are only con- 

 stituent portions of a greater life-system bound together by numerous co- 

 adaptations and adjustments. As each is adapted to, as well as dependent on, 

 external conditions, so both are dependent on one another, and as at present 

 constituted, neither could possibly enjoy a separate existence." 



Having laid before his readers a sketch of the Present Life of the Globe, its 

 plants and animals ; the causes which effect their growth ; the conditions 

 which govern their geographical distribution ; their ordinal characters ; and 

 the functions they are destined to perform in the economy of creation, our 

 author turns to the extinct — the geological record. The chronology or the 

 arrangement of the world's Past into rock-formations, and life-periods is the 

 first subject ; the continuity of natural law, the second; and these are followed 

 by a disquisition on palaeontology, the problems it has to resolve, its progress 

 and prospects. The more detailed considerations of the geological subject are 

 divided into the Par Past, the Middle Past, the Recent ; the last includes the 

 Terteary period, the age of great mammals, existing forms and distribution of 

 life, general and local extinctions, MAN-prehistoric and historic, and the muta- 

 tions of the human race. 



Mr. Page then lays down " The Law ; " and this, of course, must be re- 

 garded as the principle chapter of the book ; and some of the subjects treated 

 are amongst the grandest that can occupy the mind of man. 



