days of Moses exercised as now their structures and instincts in the "land flowing with milk and honey!"

caste "

So also in the family of ants, the neuters or sterile females form, in certain species, two, or even three castes, soldiers, workers, nurses. In Cryptocerus the workers of one carry a wonderful sort of shield on their heads;" in the Mexican genus, Myrmecocystus, the workers of one caste are fed by the workers of another caste, and have an enormously expanded abdomen where a sort of honey is secreted and stored, which, like domestic cattle they supply to the rest of the community. Mr. Darwin, with one of his usual happy illustrations, compares the workers of the "driver ant" (Anomma), to a "set of workmen building a house, of whom many were five feet four inches high, and many sixteen feet high; but we must suppose that the larger workmen had heads four instead of three times as big as those of the smaller men, and jaws nearly five times as big;" in short, the most grotesque and extravagant scene in a pantomime is realized in the industrial community of a West African ant.

Yet all these instances of exaggerated peculiarities of structure and instinct are manifested in individuals which never could have transmitted them.

No zoologist, perhaps, is better acquainted with these fatal exceptions to his principle of the organization of species by hereditary transmission of variation characters, than Mr. Darwin. He could not, with any pretension to free and candid discussion, pass over the chief instances which have checked the natural disposition of all zoologists to obtain inductively an intelligible idea of the most mysterious phenomena of their science. But the barrier at which Cuvier hesitated, Mr. Darwin rushes through, and thus he disposes of the difficulty:

“We have even slight differences in the horns of different breeds of cattle in relation to an artificially imperfect state of the male sex; for oxen of certain breeds have longer horns than in other breeds, in comparison with the horns of the bulls or cows of the same breeds. Hence I can see no real difficulty in any character having become correlated with the sterile condition of certain members of insect communities: the difficulty lies in understanding how such correlated modifications of structure could have been slowly accumulated by natural selection.

"I have such faith in the powers of selection, that I do not doubt that a breed of cattle, always yielding oxen with extraordinarily long horns, could be slowly formed by carefully watching which individual bulls and cows, when matched, produce oxen with the longest horns; and yet no one ox could ever have propagated its kind. Thus I believe it has been with social insects: a

slight modification of structure, or instinct, correlated with the sterile condition of certain members of the community, has been advantageous to the community: consequently the fertile males and transmitted to their fertile offspring a tenand females of the same community flourished, dency to produce sterile members having the same modification."-P. 238.

It is a notorious and constant fact, that the castrate bovine has longer horns than either the perfect male or female. The progressively elongating result in the case of the oxen, about which our theorist does not doubt, has not been proved experimentally. It is capable of proof or disproof. In scientific questions of far less import than the origin of animal species, involving our own, small value, if any, is attached to supposititious cases.

It is, doubtless, by no means necessary that we should sow a seed of the very cauliflower we eat in order to get more cauliflowers; seed of other individuals of the same stock will suffice. So the bee-keeper feels satisfied that the progeny of the impregnated young queen will exercise all the wonderful instincts which result in the production of wax and honey, as effectively as the virgin-sisters of the queen-mother, who were destroyed in the preceding winter. And our readers may well wonder what all this has to do with the explanation of the acquisition of the adaptive structures and instincts of neuter bees, by homoeopathic doses of Lamarckian transmutation, accumulating through a long series of hereditary transmissions? We cannot reply; we can only quote, with no less amazement, our author :

ble, is lessened, or, as I believe, disappears, when "This difficulty, though appearing insuperait is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end. Thus, a well flavored vegetable is cooked, and the individual the same stock, and confidently expects to get is destroyed; but the horticulturist sows seed of nearly the same variety; breeders of cattle wish the flesh and fat to be well marbled together; the animal has been slaughtered, but the breeder goes with confidence to the same family."-P. 237.

Now every step in the production of the breed or family of cattle may have been observed and recorded; and many of the incidents of the transmutative journey of the edible variety of cabbage from the wild stock may be similarly known; but this is just the knowledge that we desiderate in regard to the creation of the honey-bee by the way of "natural selection; " and, instead of satisfying our craving with the mature fruit of inductive research, Mr. Darwin offers us the intellectual husks above quoted, endorsed

ral selection." But how can one select if a thing be "isolated?" Even using the word in the sense of a confined area, Mr. Darwin admits that the conditions of life "throughout such area, will tend to modify all the individuals of a species in the same manner, in relation to the same conditions." (P. 104.) No evidence, however, is given of a species having ever been created in that way; but granting the hypothetical influence and transmutation, there is no selection here. The author adds, " Although I do not doubt that isolation is of considerable importance in the production of new species, on the whole, I am inclined to believe, that largeness of area is of more importance in the production of species capable of spreading widely."-P. 105.

Now, on such a question as the origin of species, and in an express, formal, scientific treatise on the subject, the expression of a belief, where one looks for a demonstration, is simply provoking. We are not concerned in the author's beliefs or inclinations to believe. Belief is a state of mind short of actual knowledge. It is a state which may govern action, when based upon a tacit admission of the mind's incompetency to prove a proposition, coupled with submissive acceptance of an authoritative dogma, or worship of a favorite idol of the mind. We readily concede, and it needs, indeed, no ghost to reveal the fact, that the wider the area in which a species may be produced, the more widely it will spread. But we fail to discern its import in respect of the great question at issue.

We have read and studied with care most of the monographs conveying the results of close investigations of particular groups of animals but have not found what Darwin asserts to be the fact, at least as regards all those investigators of particular groups of animals and plants whose treatises he has read, viz., that their authors "are, one and all, firmly convinced that each of the wellmarked forms or species was at the first independently created." Our experience has been that the monographers referred to have rarely committed themselves to any conjectural hypothesis whatever, upon the origin of the species which they have closely studied. Darwin appeals from the "experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts" which he assumes to have been "viewed from a point of view opposite to his own," to the " few naturalists endowed with much flexibility of mind," for a favorable reception of his hypothesis. We must confess that the minds to whose conclusions we incline to bow belong to that truth-loving, truth-seeking, truth-imparting

*

class, which Robert Brown, Bojanus,† Rudolphi, Cuvier, Ehrenberg,§ Herold,|| Kölliker, and Siebold, worthily exemplify. The rightly and sagaciously generalizing intellect is associated with the power of endurance of continuous and laborious research, exemplarily manifested in such monographs as we have quoted below. Their authors are the men who trouble the intellectual world little with their beliefs, but enrich it greatly with their proofs. If close and long-continued research sustained by the determination to get accurate results, blunted, as Mr. Darwin seems to imply, the far-seeing discovering faculty, then are we driven to this paradox, viz., that the elucidation of the higher problems, nay the highest in biology, is to be sought for or expected in the lucubrations of those naturalists whose minds are not weighted or troubled with more than a discursive and superficial knowledge of nature.

Lasting and fruitful conclusions have, indeed, hitherto been based only on the possession of knowledge; now we are called upon to accept an hypothesis on the plea of want of knowledge. The geological record, it is averred, is so imperfect! But what human record is not? Especially must the record of past organisms be much less perfect than of present ones. We freely admit it. But when Mr. Darwin, in reference to the absence of the intermediate fossil forms required by his hypothesis-and only the zootomical zoologist can approximatively appreciate their immense numbers-the countless hosts of transitional links which, on "natural selection," must certainly have existed at one period or another of the world's history-when Mr. Darwin exclaims what may be, or what may not be, the forms yet forthcoming out of the graveyards of strata, we would reply, that our only ground for prophesying of what may come, is by the analogy of what has come to light. We may expect, e.g., a chambered-shell from a secondary rock; but not the evidence of a creature linking on the cuttle-fish to the lump-fish.

Mr. Darwin asks, "How is it that varieties, which I have called incipient species, become ultimately good and distinct species?" To which we rejoin with the question:-Do they become good and distinct species? Is there any one instance proved by observed

*Prodromus Flora Nova Hollandiæ. † Anatome Testudinis Europææ.

ques.

Mémoires pour servir à l'Anatomie des Mollus

Die Infusionsthierchen, als vollkommene Organismen. || Disquisitiones de Animalium vertebris carentium, etc.

Entwickelungsgeschichte des Cephalopoden

facts of such transmutation? We have searched the volume in vain for such. When we see the intervals that divide most species from their nearest congeners, 'in the recent and especially the fossil series, we either doubt the fact of progressive conversion, or, as Mr. Darwin remarks in his letter to Dr. Asa Gray, one's "imagination must fill up very wide blanks.”

The last ichthyosaurus, by which the genus disappears in the chalk, is hardly distinguishable specifically from the first ichthyosaurus, which abruptly introduces that strange form of sea-lizard in the lias. The oldest Pterodactyle is as thorough and complete a one as the latest. No contrast can be more remarkable, nor, we believe, more instructive, than the abundance of evidence of the various species of ichthyosaurus throughout the marine strata of the oolitic and cretaceous periods, and the utter blank in reference to any form calculated to enlighten us as to whence the ichthyosaurus came, or what it graduated into, before or after those periods. The Enaliosauria of the secondary seas were superseded by the Cetacea of the tertiary

ones.

Professor Agassiz affirms:—

"Between two successive geological periods, changes have taken place among plants and animals. But none of these primordial forms of life which naturalists call species, are known to have changed during any of these periods. It cannot be denied that the species of different successive periods are supposed by some naturalists to derive their distinguishing features from changes which have taken place in those of preceding ages, but this is a mere supposition, supported neither by physiological nor by geological evidence; and the assumption that animals and plants may change in a similar manner during one and the same period is equally gratuitous."†

cially in Florida, with sufficient precision to ascertain that it must take about eight thousand years for one of those coral walls to rise from its foundation to the level of the surface of the There are around the southernmost exocean. centric with one another, which can be shown to tremity of Florida alone, four such reefs, conhave grown up one after the other. This gives for the beginning of the first of these reefs an age of over thirty thousand years; and yet the corals by which they were all built up are the same identical species in all of them. These facts, then, furnish as direct evidence as we can obtain in any branch of physical inquiry, that some, at least, of the species of animals now exsand years, and have not undergone the slightisting, have been in existence over thirty thouest change during the whole of that period."*

To this, of course, the transmutationists reply that a still longer period of time might do what thirty thousand years have not done.

Professor Baden Powell, for example, affirms:-"Though each species may have possessed its peculiarities unchanged for a lapse of time, the fact that when long periods are considered, all those of our earlier period are replaced by new ones at a later period, proves that species change in the end, provided a sufficiently long time is granted." But here lies the fallacy: it merely proves that species are changed, it gives us no evidence as to the mode of is in this case mere assumption. We have change; transmutation, gradual or abrupt, no objection on any score to the change; we have the greatest desire to know how it is brought about. Owen has long stated his belief that some pre-ordained law or secondary cause is operative in bringing about the change; but our knowledge of such law, if such exists, can only be acquired on the prescribed terms. We, therefore, regard the painstaking and minute comparisons by Cuvier of the osteological and every other character that could be tested in the mummified ibis, cat, or crocodile, with those of the species living in his time; and the equally

Professor Agassiz adduces evidence to show that there are animals of species now living which have been for a much longer period inhabitants of our globe.

"It has been possible," he writes, "to trace the formation and growth of our coral reefs, espe

operating at an interval of thirty thousand years in the building up of coral reefs, by the profound paleontologist of Neuchatel, as of far higher value in reference to the inductive determination of the question of the origin of species than the speculations of Demaillet, Buffon, Lamarck, Vestiges," Baden Powell, or Darwin.

66

The essential element in the complex idea of species, as it has been variously framed and defined by naturalists, viz., the bloodrelationship between all the individuals of such species, is annihilated on the hypothesis of "natural selection." According to *Ibid., p.

53.

the work of nature," we believe that this aphorism will endure; we are certain that it has not yet been refuted; and we repeat in the words of Linnæus, “Classis et Ordo est sapientiæ, Species naturæ opus."

AN ENGLISH LADY OF RANK AS THE WIFE OF A BEDOUIN CHIEF.-" Hadji," the Syrian correspondent of the Boston Traveller, furnishes the following account of the freaks of an Eng lish lady of rank and beauty, who has lately become the wife of a Bedouin chief:

"At the hotel of Mr. Rarey I found a most singular specimen of the English woman, who scems to emulate the character of the famous and once powerful Lady Hester Stanhope. Known as Lady Digby, she excites the mirth and ridicule of the natives, but as the wife of Sheikh Miguil-the Bedouin chief of Damascus -she wields a powerful influence among the Bedouins of the desert. Possessed of an ample fortune, Lady Ellenborough, once the favorite of the court of St. James, after her fall and divorce the wife of a Russian nobleman, and then of a Greek prince, established herself in Damascus a few years ago. Here she prevailed upon a noted Bedouin chief to put away his wives and live with her. They spend their winters in town and their summers in the desert, where she visits the old wives of the sheikh, tak ing with her many beautiful presents to appease their wrath and jealousy.

gering gait of the Bedouin, he disappoints every one who sees him; for one would naturally expect to see something in the appearance of the of an English lady of rank and fortune in choosing man which would account for this singular freak for herself a husband from among the rude sons of the desert. But such expectations are far from being met at sight of this most inferior specimen of the Bedouin race. This interesting couple are now on their way for Europe, where Lady Digby hopes to educate and civilize her tawny spouse."

MR. CHURCH evinces almost as much inven

tion in bestowing names upon his pictures as he does in painting them. "Twilight in the Wilderness," the title of his new landscape is almost as good a name as "The Heart of the Andes ;" and there are many who think the new picture is the better one of the two. It has, without a doubt, more poetical feeling and unity of design, and, in certain parts, has never been excelled by any of his previous performances. Now, that he has finished this picture, he will probably go to work upon his studies of icebergs, which he brought from Newfoundland last year, and give us a composition of ocean grandeurs worthy of a companionship with his Niagara, his Heart of the Andes, and his Twilight in the Wilderness.

CLERGYMEN who wish to know how to advise, manage, or direct certain worldly, discordant and troublesome members, may find it worth while to have the heads of such examined, their true characters thoroughly delineated and laid open to view, by which they may be the better enabled to govern themselves, and to make less trouble. Professor Fowler, 308 Broadway, gives his exclusive attention to practical phrenology. Clergymen are invited to call.

A FRAGMENT of his dearly bought experience is given incidentally by Mr. Sala, in his last paper on "Hogarth," where he relates how "an early patron once pressed him to write "a good poem "-"in the Byron style," you know," and offered him a guinea for it down.

"