58 
REVIEWS. 
as a hare possibility , that the world itself resembles an organic species in 
this respect, that its plan is that of a cycle ; and it will follow that it 
must have been created, like each species, bearing the marks and signs 
of a pro chronic life, which never was; and, we would add, in like man¬ 
ner, with marks and signs of a metachronic life, which never shall be. 
Let us hear Mr. Gosse himself:— 
“ It is not necessary—at least it does not seem so to me—that all the members of this 
mighty commonwealth [all organic essences] should have an actual, a diachronic exis¬ 
tence, any more than that, in the creation of a man, his foetal, infantile, and adolescent 
stages should have an actual diachronic existence, though these are essential to his 
normal life-history. Nor would their diachronism be more certainly inferrible from 
the physical traces of them, in the one case than in the other. In the newly created man, 
the proofs of successive processes requiring time, in the skin, hair, nails, bones, &c., could 
in no respect be distinguished from the like proofs in a man of to-day; yet the develop¬ 
ments to which they respectively testify are widely different-from each other, so far as 
regards the element of time. Who will say that the suggestion, that the strata of the 
surface of the earth , with their fossil Floras and Faunas , may possibly belong to a pro¬ 
chronic development of the mighty plan of the life-history of the world , —who will dare 
to say that such a suggestion is a self-evident absurdity ? If we had no example of such 
a procedure, we might be justified in dealing cavalierly with the hypothesis ; but it has 
been shown that, without a solitary exception, the whole of the vast vegetable and animal 
kingdoms were created,—mark! I do not say may have been, but must have been 
created—on this principle of a prochronic development, with distinctly traceable records. 
It was the law of organic creation." —Page 346. 
Mr. Gosse, as we conceive, bas failed to adduce a single good exam¬ 
ple of tbe law of cycles, or prochronism, as applied to the world itself, 
or to show that it resembles in this essential point the organic species, 
which forms an important part of it. His illustration, drawn from 
astronomy, is a failure. 
“ Take any one of the planetary bodies,—our moon. When its orbital motion com¬ 
menced, it commenced at some point or other of the circle which it describes in its course 
around the earth. The pre-existence, or at least the coexistence, of the earth, and also 
that of the sun, are necessary to its motion.”—Page 359. 
This view of the planetary motions is altogether erroneous, as the 
moon’s place in her orbit and velocity at any moment by no means pre¬ 
suppose a previous position and velocity; and she describes a different 
orbit each revolution. Mr. Gosse might have found in the motions of 
the moon and planets a much more powerful argument in favour of the 
extension of his law of organic species to the universe at large. We 
find that the planets revolve round the sun, the satellites round the 
planets, and the ^ sun, planets, and satellites, on their axes in the same 
direction; that the planets and satellites revolve in nearly circular 
orbits, very slightly inclined to each other; that their polar diameters 
are uniformly shorter than their equatorial; and, in general, that the 
whole solar system carries in its structure the marks of having being 
formed, by way of natural law, from a previously existing gaseous sub¬ 
stance or nebular mass. All these phenomena point backwards to a 
period antecedent to all geological phenomena, and prove clearly that 
if the solar system were created at any period between the present and 
