56 
REVIEWS. 
were placed there by the Creator, in accordance with a plan or law, of 
which there are numerous examples in the organic world; and are hy 
no means to he considered as having ever really, i. e. actually, existed. 
They existed, as Berkeley would say, as ideas in the Divine mind, 
entering into the perfect Plan on which the Almighty Architect has 
built our world, hut never really lived and moved about upon the sur¬ 
face of our globe. We shall endeavour to present to our readers the 
simple logic, divested of all illustration, which forms the argument of 
Mr. Gosse, and then introduce to their notice some of the charming illus¬ 
trations he has given of his principles. 
Mr. Gosse assumes two postulates:— 
1. The Creation of Matter ; 
2. The Persistence of Species; 
and demonstrates two laws,— 
1. All Organic nature [species] moves in a circle. 
2. Creation is a violent irruption into the circle of nature. 
I have added in a bracket the necessary limitation of Mr. Gosse’s 
first law; it is only proved of each species of Organic nature, and is in¬ 
tended hy him to be so limited. 
A single example will serve to show the meaning of this law :— 
“ Here is in my garden a scarlet-runner. It is a slender twining stem, some three 
feet long, beset with leaves, with a growing bud at one end, and with the other inserted 
in the earth. What was it a month ago ? A tiny shoot, protruding from between two 
thick fleshy leaves scarcely raised above the ground. A month before that, the thick 
fleshy leaves were two oval cotyledons, closely appressed face to face, with the minute 
plumule between them, the whole enclosed in an unbroken, tightly-fitting, spotted, lea¬ 
thery coat. It was a bean, a seed. 
“ Was this the commencement of its existence? Oh! no! Six months earlier still it 
was snugly lying, with several others like itself, in a green fleshy pod, to the interior of 
which it was organically attached. A month before that this same pod with its contents 
was the centre of a scarlet butterfly-like flower, the bottom of its pistil, within which, if 
you had split it open, you would have discerned the tiny beans, whose history we are 
tracing backwards, each imbedded in the soft green tissue, but no bigger than the eye 
of a cambric needle. 
“ But where was this flower ? It was one of many that glowed on my garden wall 
all through last summer ; each cluster springing as a bud from a slender twining stem, 
which was the exact counterpart of that with which we commenced this little life-history. 
“ And this earlier stem—what of it? It, too, had been a shoot, a pair of cotyledons 
with a plumule, a seed, an integral part of a carpel, which was a part of an earlier flower, 
that expanded from an earlier bud, that grew out of an earlier stem, that had been a still 
earlier seed, that had been -- and backward, ad infinitum , for ought that I can 
perceive.- 
“ The course, then, of a scarlet-runner is a circle, without beginning or end :—that is, 
I mean, without a natural, a normal beginning or end. For at what point of its history 
can you put your finger, and say, ‘ Here is the commencement of this organism, before 
which there is a blank ; here it began to exist ?’ There is no such point; no stage which 
does not look back to a previous stage, on which this stage is inevitably and absolutely 
dependent.”—Page 113. 
It follows necessarily from the Law thus illustrated, and from the 
Postulates assumed, that whenever it pleased the Almighty Creator to 
form an Organic species, He voluntarily subjected Himself to the condi¬ 
tion, that the creature so formed should hear on it the marks of a pre- 
