climatal conditions on the earth's surface. The individuals of species least adapted to bear such influences and incapable of modifying their organization in harmony therewith, have perished. Extinction, therefore, on this hypothesis, is due to the want of selfadjusting, self-modifying power in the individuals of the species. from the microscopic monad upwards, indicate the various periods in time at which the first step of the series they respectively terminate began. The monad that by "natural selection" has ultimately become man, dates from the furthest point in the remote past, upon which our feigners of developmental hypotheses can draw with unlimited credit: the monad which by its superficial vibratile cilia darted across the field of the microscope we were looking through this morning, is the result of the collocation of particles which, without "sudden flash," took place under the operation of the hete-new conditions, would tell upon its vigor and rogeneous organizing force of yesterday. Accordingly we find that every grade of structure, from the lowest to the highest, from the most simple to the most complex, is now in being, a result which it is impossible to reconcile with the Darwinian hypothesis of the one and once only created primordial form, the parent of all subsequent living things. The changes which our planet has undergone in the course of geological time have been accompanied by the loss of many minor links which connected together the existing evidences of gradational structure; but the general laws regulating the progress and diversity of organic forms, having been the same throughout all time, so it happens, according to the testimony of the most experienced palæontologists, that "Every known fossil belongs to some one or other of the existing classes, and that the organic remains of the most ancient fossiliferous strata do not indicate or suggest that any earlier and different group of beings remains to be discovered, or has been irretrievably lost in the universal metamorphism of the oldest rocks."* That forms, recognized as species by their distinctive characters and the power of propagating them, have ceased to exist, and have successively passed away, is a fact now unquestioned; that they have been exterminated by exceptional cataclysmal changes of the earth's surface, as was surmised at the first acceptance of the fact of extinction, has not been proved; that their limitation in time may, in some instances, or in some degree, be due to constitutional changes, accumulating by slow degrees in the long course of generations, is possible: but all the traceable and observed causes of extirpation point either to continuous slowly operating geological changes, or to no greater sudden cause than the apparition of mankind on a limited tract of land not before inhabited. It is now, therefore, generally inferred that the extinction of species, prior to man's existence, has been due to ordinary causes-ordinary in the sense of agreement with the great laws of never-ending mutation of geographical and * Owen's Palæontology, p. 18. THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. 505 In the joint paper on the tendency of varieties to form species by natural means of selection,* one of the authors writes : "Any minute variation in structure, habits, or instincts, adapting the individual better to the health. In the struggle it would have a better chance of surviving, and those of its offspring which inherited the variation would also have a better chance. Let this work go on for a thousand generations, and who will pretend to affirm," "that a new species might asks Mr. Darwin, not be the result?" Thereupon is adduced the imaginary example of dogs and rabbits on an island, which we have already cited. Now this, we take leave to say, is no very profound or recondite surmise; it is just one of those obvious possibilities that might float through the imagination of any speculative naturalist; only, the sober searcher after truth would prefer a blameless silence to sending the proposition forth as explanatory of the origin of species, without its inductive foundation. is one of the primitive types,-the created In the degeneration-theory of Buffon, man apes and monkeys are derivatives. He might have illustrated it as follows: To give an imaginary example from changes in progress on an island: let the organization of a wild man feeding chiefly on fruits become slightly plastic; let corresponding changes cause the sources of food on the ground very slowly to decrease, and those on the trees to increase; the effect of this would be that the man would try to climb more for food. Suppose also that a tiger or like destructive carnivore should swim over and settle in the island, which happened to be destitute of flints for weapons. The human organization being slightly plastic, those individuals with the longest and strongest arms, and with the most prehensile use of the great toe, let the difference be ever so small, would be slightly favored, would survive during that time of the year when food was scarcest on the ground, but ripe and ready on certain trees; they would also rear more young which would tend to inherit these slight peculiarities. The best climbers would escape the tigers, the worst would be rigidly destroyed. By Darwin and Wallace," Proceedings of the Linnæan Society," August, 1858, p. 45. Buffon would have seen no more reason to Mr. Darwin, when naturalist on board H.M.S. doubt that these causes, in a thousand gen- Beagle, " to throw some light on the origin erations, would produce a marked effect, and of species." But the close resemblance of adapt the form of the wild man to obtain the style, and of the tone and frame of mind fruits rather than grains, than Darwin now which could see no difficulty in the adequacy believes that man can be improved by selec- of the above-cited circumstances of “extertion and careful interbreeding into a higher, nal conditions, of habit, of volition," to change more heroic, more angelic form! The ad- a bear into a whale, to those exemplified in vocate of Buffon's hypothesis might point the "Philosophie Zoologique," point strongly out that it is on islands, as Borneo and Sum- to the writings of Lamarck as the true sugatra, for example, where the orang-utan-gester of Mr. Darwin's views of animated the obvious result of such " degradation by nature. We look, however, in vain for any natural selection"-is exclusively found. instance of hypothetical transmutation in And is it not there also, and in some other Lamarck so gross as the one above cited; islands of the Malayan Archipelago, where we must descend to older illustrators of the the next step in the scale of "degeneration" favorite idea, to find an equivalent case of is exhibited in the still longer-armed Ungkas the bear in pursuit of water-insects, and we and other tail-less Hylobates? And though find one in the following:we call them "tail-less" yet they have the "os coccygis;" and this being a terminal appendage of stunted vertebræ, offers the very condition for the manifestation of an occasional developmental variety. If cats, after accidental mutilation or malformation, can propagate a tail-less breed, why may not apes produce a tailed variety, and by natural selection in a long course of ages, degenerate into endless incipient species of "baboons and monkeys ?" But Mr. Darwin, it may be said, repudiates the coarse transmutational conditions and operations of Buffon and Lamarck; or, if there be any parallel between his and Buffon's illustration of the changing of species, at all events such parallels must run in opposite directions. sons aîlés et volans chassant ou étant chassés "Car il peut arriver, comme nous sçavons qu'en effet il arrive assez souvent, que les poisdans la mer, emportés du desir de la proie ou être à quelques pas du rivage par des vagues de la crainte de la mort, ou bien poussés peutqu'excitoit une tempête, soient tombés dans des roseaux ou dans des herbages, d'où ensuite il ne leur fut pas possible de reprendre vers la mer l'essor qui les en avoit tirés, et qu'en cet état ils ayent contracté une plus grande faculté de voler. Alors leurs nageoires n'étant plus baignées des caux de la mer, se fendirent et se déjettèrent par la sécheresse. Tandis qu'ils trouvèrent dans les roseaux et les herbages dans lesquels ils étoient tuyaux de leurs nageoires, séparés les uns des tombés, quelques alimens pour se soutenir, les autres, se prolongèrent et se revêtirent de barbes ; ou, pour parler plus juste, les membranes qui Mr. Darwin starts from a single created pro- auparavant les avoient tenus collés les uns aux totype, from which it is difficult to conceive autres se métamorphosèrent. La barbe formée he can mean any other course of organic de ces pellicules déjetées s'allongea elle-même; progress than an ascensive one. But of this, la peau de ces animaux se revêtit insensiblement in the absence of a definition of the starting d'un duvet de la même couleur dont elle étoit point, we cannot be perfectly sure. "Natu-peinte, et ce duvet grandit. Les petits aîlerons ral selection" may operate in both directions. qu'ils avoient sous le ventre, et qui comme leurs The following, for example, would have been cordially welcomed by Buffon as a testimony in favor of his "dégénération" hypothesis:"In North America the black bear was seen by Ilearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale." * If the ursine species had not been restricted to northern latitudes, we might have surmised this to have been one of the facts connected with "the distribution of the inhabitants of South America," which seemed to * Darwin, p. 184. (1st edition.) nageoires, leur avoient aidé à se promener dans la mer, devinrent des pieds, et leur servirent à marcher sur la terre. Il se fit encore d'autres petits changemens dans leur figure. Le bec et le col des uns s'allongèrent; ceux des autres se racourçirent: il en fut de même du reste du corps. Cependant la conformité de la première figure subsiste dans le total; et elle est et sera toujours aisée à reconnoître. "Examinez en effet toutes les espèces de poules, grosses et petites, même celles des Indes, celles qui sont huppées, ou celles qui ne le sont pas ; celles dont les plumes sont à rebours telles qu'on en voit à Damiette, c'est-à-dire, dont le plumage est couché de la queue à la tête; vous trouverez leuses ou sans écailles. Toutes les espèces de dans la mer des espèces toutes semblables, écailperroquets dont les plumages sont si divers, les oiseaux les plus rares et les plus singulièrement marquetés sont conformes à des poissons peints, comme eux, de noir, de brun, de gris, de jaune, * Darwin, p. 1. (1st edition.) de verd, de rouge, de violet, de couleur d'or et d'azur; et cela précisément dans les mêmes parties où les plumages de ces mêmes oiseaux sont diversifiés d'une manière si bizarre.”* ural selection," - then, according to the rate of modification experimentally proved in pigcons, we ought to find evidence of progressive increase in the combative qualities of Demaillet, it must be admitted, enters antlers in those deer that for centuries have more fully into the details of the operation still more so in those that have fought and been under observation in our parks, and of "natural selection," in changing the fish into the bird; and it is, perhaps, from this bred from the earliest historical times in the very “naïveté" in the exposition of his theory, mountain wilds of Scotland. The element that its weakness has been made so obvious of "natural selection," above illustrated, to later zoologists and comparative anato- either is, or is not, a law of nature. If it be mists. Mr. Darwin rarely shows a fair front one, the results should be forthcoming; more to these searching tests; the facts of the manespecially in those exceptional cases in which ner of transmutation, as they might have nature herself has superadded structures, as sented themselves to his fancy, are not stated it were, expressly to illustrate the consewith the "abandon" of the old French Phi-quences of such "general struggle for the losopher. Vague and general as is the illus-life of the individual and the continuance of tration based upon Hearne's remark, it is made still more vague in a later reprint of the volume "On the Origin of Species." It now reads, "In North America, the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely opened mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water." (Ed. 1860, p. 184.) pre "Individuals, it is said, of every species, in a state of nature, annually perish," and "the survivors will be, for the most part, those of the strongest constitutions and the best adapted to provide for themselves and offspring, under the circumstances in which they exist." Now, let us test the applicability of this postulate to the gradual mutation of a specific form by some instance in Natural History eminently favorable for the assumed results. In many species, nature has superadded to general health and strength, particular weapons and combative instincts, which, as, e. g., in the deer-tribe, insure to the strongest, to the longest-winded, the largest-antlered, and the sharpest-snagged stags, the choice of the hinds and the chief share in the propagation of the next generation. In such peculiarly gifted species we have the most favorable conditions for test ing one of the conclusions drawn by Messrs. Darwin and Wallace from this universally life and kind." If the offspring, inheriting recognized "struggle for the preservation of the advantages of their parents, did in their turn, however slightly and gradually, increase those advantages, and give birth to a still more favored progeny, with repetition of the result to the degree required by "nat "Telliamed, ou Entretiens d'un Philosophe Indien avec un Missionaire François, sur la Diminution de la Mer," etc., 8vo, Amsterdam, 1768. An edition in two volumes of this original and suggestive work, was printed, with the life of the author (Demaillet), at the Hague, in 1755. The passage quoted will be found at p. 166, tom. ii. of this edition.) the race." The antlers of deer are expressly given to the male, and permitted to him, in fighting trim, only at the combative sexual season; they fall and are renewed annually; they belong, moreover, to the most plastic and variable parts or appendages of the quadruped. Is it, then, a fact that the fallow-deer propagated under these influences in Windsor Forest, since the reign of William Rufus, now manifest in the superior condition of kind of change which the successions of the antlers, as weapons, that amount and generations under the influence of "natural selection" ought to have produced? Do the crowned antlers of the red deer of the nineteenth century surpass those of the turbaries and submerged forest-lands which date back long before the beginning of our English history? Does the variability of the artificially bred pigeon, or of the cultivated cabbage outweigh, in a philosophical consideration of the origin of species, those obstinate evidences of persistence of specific types and of inherent limitation of change of character, however closely the seat of such characters of taking care of self and of begetting offmay be connected with the "best chance spring? If certain bounds to the varia bility of specific characters be a law in nature, we then can see why the successive have exceeded the specific limit assigned to progeny of the best antlered deer, proved to be best by wager of battle, should never such best possible antlers under that law of limitation. If unlimited variability by "natural selection" be a law, we ought to see some degree of its operation in the peculiarly favorable test-instance just quoted. That the variability of an organism to a certain extent is a constant and certain condition of life we admit, otherwise there "Individual males have had, in successive generations, some slight advantago over other males in their weapons, and have transmitted these advantages to their male offspring."-Darwin, p. 89 would be no distinguishable individuals of a species. The forester, by the operation of this law of variability, is able to distinguish his individual oaks, the shepherd his particular sheep, the teacher his several scholars. This true and proved law of variability is, in fact, the essential condition of individuality itself. We have searched in vain, from Demaillet to Darwin, for the evidence or the proof, that it is only necessary for one individual to vary, be it ever so little, in order to the conclusion that the variability is progressive and unlimited, so as, in the course of generations, to change the species, the genus, the order, or the class. We have no objection to this result of "natural selection" in the abstract; but we desire to have reason for our faith. What we object to is, that science should be compromised through the assumption of its true character by mere hypotheses, the logical consequences of which are of such deep importance. The powers, aspirations, and missions of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations. Every step in the progress of this study has tended to obliterate the technical barriers by which logicians have sought to separate the inquiries relating to the several parts of man's nature. The considerations involved in the attempt to disclose the origin of the worm are inadequate to the requirements of the higher problem of the origin of man; and it may be that the conditions of that problem are beyond our present powers of acquiring certain knowledge. To him, indeed, who may deem himself devoid of soul and as the brute that perisheth, any speculation, pointing, with the smallest feasibility, to an intelligible notion of the way of coming in of a lower organized species, may be sufficient, and he need concern himself no further about his own relations to a Creator. But when the members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain are taught by their evening lecturer that such a limited or inadequate view and treatment of the great problem exemplifies that application of science to which England owes her greatness, we take leave to remind the managers that it more truly parallels the abuse of science to which a neighboring nation, some seventy years since, owed its temporary degradation. By their fruits may the promoters of true and false philosophy be known. We gazed with amazement at the audacity of the dispenser of the hour's intellectual amusement, who, availing himself of the technical ignorance of the majority of his auditors, sought to blind them as to the frail foundations of "natural selection" by such illustrations as the subjoined: Hyrax Rhinoceros Tapir Horse PALEOTHERE. Tumbler Runt Pouter Fantail ROCK-PIGEON. The above diagrams were set before an intelligent audience by a professor, in whom they naturally repose confidence as to facts specially belonging to his science, as parallel instances of departure from type: the one illustrating the extent and directions in which varieties diverge from a type form, in long course of time, by "natural selection;" the other showing the correlative examples of such divergence, in a short course of time, through human selection. He told them that, in the latter series, the skeleton varied in regard to the number of vertebra; but did not remark that it was in the variable region of the tail, on which no ornithologist ever depended for a specific character, neither did he state that the alleged difference in the number of dorsal vertebræ was one that is merely simulated by a greater or less extent of the process of anchylosis over a region of the spinal column in which every vertebra was originally distinct. With regard to the parallel diagram, no allusion was made to such differences in the relative position of the cranial bones as the following, viz. that in the palæotherium, as in the tapir, the maxillary bones intervene between and separate the nasal bones from the intermaxillary bones; whilst in the horse, as in the hyrax, the nasal and intermaxillary bones are united as far as their extremities; that, consequently, the external nostril is bounded by four bones in the horse, but by six in its implied progenitor; that there is as marked a difference in the conformation of the orbit, which is encircled by the union of the malar with the frontal bone in the horse, but is left widely open or incomplete, by the want of such union in the same two cranial bones of the palæothere. The advocate of the "natural selection" view exaggerated resemblances and glossed over discrepancies of structure. The resemblance of the Palaothere to its four hypothetical descendants, in respect of their more generalized or more specialized structures, was flippantly affirmed to be as that of a father to his four sons! † "The Nothing was said to give his hearers a no- | morphologically but physiologically alike; tion of the important difference between the not merely are the differences of form and horse and palæothere in the structure and structure similar and equivalent, but the implantation of the whole dental system. powers of procreation are the same. Yet the horse resembles the elephant in hav- hybrids or mongrels from between all the ing a long mass of complexly interblended domestic breeds of pigeons are perfectly dental substances deeply implanted in a large fertile ; so, likewise, are the hybrids or simple socket; whilst the palæothere differs mongrels from between all the domestic from both, in having a short mass or crown breeds of the horse. Now, as this is not the of differently disposed dental substances im- case with the hybrid between any variety of planted by several long fangs in a corre- the horse and of the ass, it may be inferred spondingly complex socket. To the compe- that the physiological distinction would be, tent anatomist a score of such anatomical at least, as great, or more insuperable, bedifferences would be present to the memory tween the horse and the tapir, or the rhinocin contrasting the two alleged parallel series eros, or the palæotherium. The infertility, of differences from selection natural and hu- or very rare fertility, of the solipedous mule, man; to which differences in the palæonto- even when paired with a true horse or ass, logical series nothing comparable in essential and the absolute infertility of such hybrids value has been pointed out in the varieties inter se, are facts so notorious, that the proof Columba livia. The competent palæon- fessorial advocate of natural selection" tologist, moreover, would detect the super- was compelled to admit that his alleged parficial character of the knowledge that would allel broke down at the physiological test,— interpose the tapir in any series leading from the most important element of the comparpalæotherium: he would point to the cocene ison. fophiodon as the true ancestor of the tapir on the derivative hypothesis. Neither zoology nor physiclogy as yet, however, possesses a single fact to support the idea that six incisor and two canine teeth, as in the palæothere, could be blended or changed, by progressive transmutation, into the pair of large scalpriform teeth that projects from the fore part of the lower jaw in the hyrax or scriptural coney. The genuine cultivator of science and true representative of the minds on which the glory and greatness of nations depend, would feel bound to illustrate any series of observed varieties of a species by a true parallel. The hoofed mammals which afford this parallel with the diverging series of pigeons, are the following: Tumbler Runt Pouter Fantail COLUMBA COLUMBA LIVIA. Racer Dray-horse Barb Galloway EQUUS CABALLUS. It is assumed by Mr. Darwin that variations, useful in some way to each being, occur naturally in the course of thousands of generations (p. 80), that such variations are reproduced in the offspring, and, if in harmony with external circumstances, may be heightened in still further modified descendants of the species. The transmission and exaggeration of a variety, step by step, in the generative series, essential to the theory of "natural selection," implies the fertility of the individuals constituting the several steps of the series of transmutation. But numerous instances, familiar to every zoölogist, suggest an objection which seems fatal to the theory, since they show extreme peculiarities of structure and instinct in individuals that cannot transmit them, because they are doomed to perpetual sterility. The most numerous and important members of the hive, which collect the pollen on their peculiarly expanded thighs, and the honey in their peculiarly valvular crop or 66 honey-bag," and which, in the construction of cells of a shape adapted to contain the greatest possible quantity of honey with least possible consumption of wax, have practically solved a recondite mathematical problem, are the neuters, or females with aborHere the differences in regard to size, color, tive sexual organs,-"non-breeding females" development of tegumentary appendages, of our great physiologist Hunter. From the number of caudal vertebræ, length or stunt- hypothetical protoplastic progenitor of all edness of muzzle, relative length of limb to animal species, what an enormous series of body, etc., are closely analogous with the di-"slight modifications of structure and inversities which Mr. Darwin has dwelt upon in the first chapter of his work. And not only are the subjects of the above diagrams 1860. Journal of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. stinct" must have rolled, snow-ball like, along the articulate line of departure, to have accumulated, according to "natural selection," in the Apis mellifica, which in the * Darwin, p. 26. |