THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER. 
199 
the Society, and hence to deserve every 
support. 
I am, Sir, 
Yours truly, 
John Edward Gray. 
Brighton, March 15. 
ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 
Extracts from Dr. Asa Gray’s ‘ Free 
Examination of Darwin's Treatise 
and of its American Reviewers.’ 
“ It is by no means difficult to believe 
that varieties are incipient or possible 
species, when we see what trouble natu- 
ralists, especially botanists, have to dis- 
tinguish between them, — one regarding- 
as a true species what another regards as 
a variety; when the progress of know- 
ledge continually increases, rather than 
diminishes, the number of doubtful in- 
stances ; and when there is less agree- 
ment than ever among naturalists as to 
what is the basis in nature upon which 
our idea of species reposes, or how the 
word is to be defined.” * * * * 
“ The beginning of things must needs 
lie in obscurity, beyond the bounds of 
proof, though within those of conjecture 
or of analogical inference. Why not 
hold fast to the customary view, that 
species were directly, instead of in- 
directly, created, after their respective 
kinds, as we now behold them, — and 
that in a manner which, passing our 
comprehension, we intuitively refer to 
the supernatural? Why this continual 
striving after ‘ the unattained and dim ’ ? 
why these anxious endeavours, especially 
of late years, by naturalists and philoso- 
phers of various schools and different 
tendencies, to penetrate what one of 
them calls ‘ that mystery of mysteries,’ 
the origin of species ? ” 
“ To this, in general, sufficient answer 
may be found in the activity of the 
human intellect, ‘ the delirious yet divine 
desire to know,’ stimulated as it has 
been by its own success, in unveiling the 
laws and processes of inorganic Nature, 
— in the fact that the principal triumphs 
of our age in physical science have con- 
sisted in tracing connections where none 
were known before, in reducing hetero- 
geneous phenomena to a common cause 
or origin in a manner quite analogous to 
that of the reduction of supposed inde- 
pendently originated species to a common 
ultimate origin, — thus, and in various 
other ways, largely and legitimately ex- 
tending the domain of secondary causes. 
Surely the scientific mind of an age 
which coutemplates the solar system as 
evolved from a common, revolving fluid 
mass, — which, through experimental re- 
search, has come to regard light, heat, 
electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity 
and mechanical power, as varieties or 
derivative and convertible forms of one 
force, instead of independent species, — 
which has brought the so-called ele- 
mentary kinds of matter, such as the 
metals, into kindred groups, and perti- 
nently raised the question, whether the 
members of each group may not be mere 
varieties of one species, — and which 
speculates steadily in the direction of the 
ultimate unity of matter, of a sort of 
prototype or simple element which may 
be to the ordinary species of matter what 
the Protozoa, or what the component 
cells of an organism, are to the higher 
sorts of animals and plants, — the minds 
of such an age cannot be expected to let 
the old belief about species pass un- 
questioned. It will raise the question, 
