instances would be few indeed, where these crossings did not take place, and where neighbouring tribes did not interchange the productions of the soil. All this, moreover, involves a history of mankind, to be worked out of the imagination; for how did the first stock of men (educed out of a previous stock of superior apes) separate from the first family so as to avoid neighbourhood, crossings, and interchange of food? For it is one part of this Theory, that a Species, to become such truly, must have been long isolated, and have lived long on one soil. When this process has been continued a sufficient time, then the Species is formed, with law of fecundity. But man sprung from a very superior quadrumanous animal, very far superior to the gorilla. His history, therefore, and that of his predecessors, with the soil they lived on, &c., &c., have all to be sketched by the imagination-it cannot be a history of facts. M. Trémaux attributes to the soil some undefined mysterious action, which he does not explain; that it is something more than the difference of the food which it produces, is evident from the following passage. 'L'homme se nourrit de différentes espèces végétales et animales particulières à chacune des grandes divisions continentales. De la parait resulter un ensemble de physionomies propre à chacune de ces divisions, et même une certaine corrélation de forme, mais elle n'empêche nullement l'action du sol de se dessiner nettement sous cette influence particulière' (24). The action of the soil,' then, is something over and above the action of the food it produces. A principle of transmutation exists in the soil: in the recent soils, the tendency of its action is towards perfection; in the primi tive soil, it is towards degeneration and debasement. What may be the nature of this action, is not unfolded to us; it is, in fact, the mystery of M. Trémaux's system, and is analogous to the law of development,' and the independent productive power,' of the other writers of this school. Like the rest of his fellow-labourers, M. Trémaux personifies Nature, and talks of her objects and intentions, as if the various forms of life had all been projected in an antecedent plan. 'Si l'on cherche à créer une nouvelle espèce par le croisement, on échoue; ce qui est bien naturel, puisque, dans la Nature, son but est contraire, c'est à dire qu'il unifie les êtres qui y sont soumis au lieu de les diversifier d'autres termes son but est de grouper les êtres en espèces distinctes .... la Nature se refuse à faire une nouvelle espèce' (189). ; en Now this is remarkable language, as it is precisely that which, as we have seen, Saint Hilaire said he could not use—'I cannot make Nature as an intelligent being,' and yet M. Trémaux is strictly of the Material School, no writer can be more so. All the perfect types of animals have been produced on recent soils. The primitive soil of the first geological ages was composed of disintegrations, effected at one epoch only ; the recent soil of our epoch is made of disintegrations, effected during all the geological epochs,—the disintegration of the ancient rocks mingled in the soil renders it completely unfit for man (119—20). Man reaches perfection, or degenerates according to the recent or ancient soil on which he lives; and as soon as he reaches the type proper to the conditions in which he is chanical cause, he observes (147), 'If the arrangements alluded to could be shown to be the results of still higher mechanical causes, it would but furnish a still higher proof of Intelligence, instead of being antagonistic to it; mechanism is the very exponent of mind,' and yet he objects to any inference of design or purpose-' for the structure of the universe we can infer no final design or purpose whatever, which is perpetual in its adjustments, offering no evidence of beginning or end' (237); though he adds these remarkable words, however, the limited evidence in some of its parts, of adjustment of means to ends, may warrant the conjecture of other higher unknown purposes.' In the notes appended to 'The Order of Nature,' the Professor very plainly takes his place in the School of Transmutation, objecting to the idea of creation,* as derived from religion, and therefore having no place in science.' That all Species were derived from older ones seems to him a necessity by the universal Law of Continuity; and if there is an absence of evidence to prove this by geological records, it is because the evidence has not yet been found (467). This point he takes up with some asperity, calling it'a trite objection,' which he thinks he has disposed of' in some previous publication. He then quotes Professor Brown of Heidelberg, who * It has been already shown that Creation is not necessarily connected with any religious idea, and that Lucretius, of all writers most adverse to religious impressions, freely uses the term; take this instance, in which he says that things may be created without the intervention of the Deity :Quas ob res, ubi viderimus nihil posse creari De nihilo, tum, quod sequimur, jam rectius inde Et quo quæque modo fiant operâ sine Divûm.—(i. 155.) Lucretius more than once gives the title of creatrix to Nature:- Omnia perduxit rerum Natura creatrix.—(ii. 1115.) lays down two laws by which, as he avers, the sequence of organic beings has been regulated. 1. By an independent productive power constantly advancing in an intensive as well as extensive direction or degree. 2. By the nature and change of the outward condition of existence under which the organic beings to be called forth were to live. Both these laws are in the closest connection with each other, although we cannot understand the productive power. Here, again, the Transmutationist brings up his system. to a blank wall in the labyrinth of error. We have here 'an independent productive power which we cannot understand.' This by the ancients would be termed Nature, or God; and all indeed that we seem to gain by the various teachers of this school is a choice of new words. We say that a supreme Mind, whose actions are inscrutable, performed the acts of creation which we do not even hope to explain; the new school, after preaching against creation, presents us with an independent productive power which they cannot understand,'-' or an abnormal tendency not yet understood.' What have we gained by these new terms ? what has been proved or advanced by them? are not the old words as good? and are they not far more respectable? There is one peculiarity in Professor Powell's views—that he speaks with a sort of magisterial certainty of our ultimately understanding all these mysteries; that we shall, in * It is remarkable that though these laws are quoted by Powell with approbation, Brown himself does not seem to have been a Transmutationist, for he distinctly says, ' no experience proves that any one species or genus, or even an order or a class, has really been transformed into another' (465): and for this Professor Powell reproves him, as not having sufficiently considered the subject. due time, be able to interpret this unknown power; and that, if 'life is unknown, it only remains to be made known.' He seems to think that the day is not far distant when the mysteries of life and generation will be as thoroughly understood as any chemical problem that science has mastered. We shall see some persons, however, will doubt this. As Professor Powell wisely abstained from entering into any details, contenting himself with advocating the general principle, he has escaped the ridicule which must be the lot of all those who undertake to furnish us with the pedigree of animals, evolving from one another. Thus he is able, not having committed himself, to speak slightingly of Lamarck, and to call the Vestiges of Creation a philosophical romance' (173). An unkind cut at a fellow-labourer and associate in that school of which both are teachers. Mr Darwin has, in The Historical Sketch of the recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species,' which is a sort of preface to his book, given a brief notice of writers whom he considers, either directly or indirectly, as favourable to the theory of Transmutation. Most of those names have been mentioned in this chapter, but he also reckons as his coadjutor the Hon. and Rev. W. Herbert, Dean of Manchester, who, in a work on Amaryllidaceæ, 1837, advanced the proposition that botanical species are only a higher and more permanent class of varieties:' the precise language used by Mr Darwin. He also believed that the single Species of each animal was created in an originally highly plastic condition (i. e. with capacities for metamorphose), and that these have produced by intercrossing, all our existing Species. This statement we take |