THE 
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
JANUARY, 1882. 
I. THE LAW OF EVOLUTION: IS IT GENERAL? 
S HE truth of Evolution as a primary law of the Universe 
must to a great extent turn on its generality. If we 
see traces of its action — not demonstrable, but merely 
probable — in each class of phenomena which we successively 
examine, the difficulties in the way of its acceptance will be 
very much lessened. Now we find it beyond all dispute in 
the growth of the individual animal or vegetable from the 
germ to maturity. We say “ beyond, dispute,” though we know 
a somewhat eccentric thinker who maintains that this develop- 
ment is an illusion, and that the infant, the boy, the youth, 
and the man are not four successive stages of one and the 
same being, but four distinct beings which succeed each 
other. Whether he puts forward this strange speculation as 
a mere dialectical exercise, or as a reductio ad absurdum of 
the hypothesis of separate creation, we have never been able 
to feel satisfied. 
To return : we recognise Evolution, then, in the individual, 
in the nation, and in human society at large. In the animal 
and vegetable world we see good cause to accept it as the 
probable method in which those forms we call species have 
originated. Passing on to the other extremity of the scale, 
Evolution, as opposed to individual appearance, seems gene- 
rally received as the process by which the heavenly bodies 
have taken their rise. It is not for this purpose necessary 
that we should accept the “ nebular hypothesis,” the cos- 
mogony of Kant and La Place, and deduce suns and planets 
from the gradual condensation of a fire mist. The obvious 
difficulties which beset this hypothesis need not, as modern 
VOL. IV. (third series.) b 
