[September, 
584 Analyses of Books . 
A third essay discusses the possibility of reaching the North 
Pole, and the causes of the failure of former attempts. 
The three treatises which make up the first portion of the 
volume are of a wider and a more permanent interest. They 
are devoted to the “ Theory of Evolution— the Value and Corre- 
spondence of the Evidence upon which it is founded ; “ Lamarck, 
his Life and Works and “ Floras, their Origin, Composition, 
and Migrations.” 
In leading these essays we feel ourselves in the society of a 
philosophical naturalist of high order. He declares that “ the 
theory of Evolution made known by Lamarck in 1809, philoso- 
phically comprehended by Goethe, definitely constituted by 
Charles Darwin and developed by his pupils, links together all 
the parts of natural history just as the researches of Newton 
harmonised the movements of the heavenly bodies. It is, indeed, 
closely connected with the transformation of the physical forces. ’ 
Here we miss the recognition of Erasmus Darwin, who certainly 
was not an imitator of Lamarck, and who yet came very near 
anticipating his illustrious grandson. The objedt of Professor 
Martins, in the treatise before us, is to show that the Evolutionist 
theory possesses all the characteristics of the Newtonian laws, 
and that like them it rests upon a daily accumulating mass of 
evidence. To this end he first expounds the continuity of crea- 
tion and the phenomena of atavism. If each zoological epoch 
terminated, according to the catastrophists, in some convulsion 
of nature which made a clean sweep of all animal and vegetable 
life, how is it that plants which existed in the Tertiary period, 
such as the pomegranate, the Judas tree, the oleander, the gincko, 
&c., — though extirpated in their old haunts by reason of climatic 
alterations, still survive in warmer regions ? Hence we see that 
the flora of to-day is a continuation of the flora of the past, the 
forms being either identical or somewhat modified. The gincko 
has the leaves of a fern, the stem of a Coniier, the catkin male 
blossoms of the Amentaceas (poplar, birch, &c.), and the naked 
seeds of a Cycad. These farts indicate that the ferns are the 
common ancestors of the gincko and of the Cycads. 
In like manner the living fauna is the uninterrupted continua- 
tion of the fossil fauna. The animals which move and multiply 
around us are descendants of the beings wnose skeletons or cases 
have rested for unnumbered ages in the rocks. As instances the 
author mentions the modern elephant, rhinoceros, tapir, &c., so 
little modified from their ancestors, and which therefore seem 
almost out of place among forms which have changed so rapidly 
as the deer, the antelope, and especially the horse. . He points 
out that numbers of extinrt species hold, as it were, intermediate 
positions, and form “ missing links ” between living groups whose 
characters they combine. 
The phenomena of atavism are no less striking among animals 
than among plants. Numerous forms display the atrophied and 
