be gleaned from the world of instinct than such as affront all legitimate analogy, and gratuitously dissociate the marvels of nature from their only true solvent, the ordination of God. f Who made the spider parallels design, Who bid the stork, Columbus-like, explore Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before? Who calls the councils, states the certain day, Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way? Its proper bliss, and sets its proper bounds. : Thy arts of building from the bee receive, Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave; Learn of the little nautilus to sail, Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale : Here, too, all forms of social union find, And hence let Reason, late, instruct mankind : There towns aerial on the waving tree : The ant's republic and the realm of bees. 62 30. Nothing then appears more certain from the examination of nature than that each creature has an orbit assigned to it, the attempted transgression of which would be, not the improvement of the species, but the destruction of the individual. A frog trying to select Why has no The pelican itself into an ox would not thereby become bovine: it would simply burst. How strange, on Mr. Darwin's scheme, that such aspirings are confined to the region of fable, and that no animal has ever been seen on the road which such countless myriads must have travelled between the old species and the new! creature ever been caught in transitu? feeding its young from its bosom, however beautiful in ecclesiastical symbolism, is unknown to all but legendary lore. On the principle of natural selection, as has been pertinently observed, a protracted exercise of the pugnacious propensity ought to improve the weapons of attack; and yet the antlers of the red-deer now alive in Windsor Forest are no whit better than those found in the "submerged forest - lands which date back long before the beginning of our English history.” 63 After an exposure to modifying influences of the most powerful kind, including the companionship of man, the dog, as if to show that no such influences can make a creature other substantially than the Maker made it, is what it was in the days of the Pharaohs. The anatomical approach to the human species, which reaches its permitted maximum in the higher quadrumana, was as evident to Ennius 64 as to Mr. Rogers or Mr. Darwin. But then, as now, (not to anticipate the inquest for a more profound partition) the four "graspers" of Pithecus and Troglodytes, the most anthropoid of apes, were very different instruments from the true hand and foot, as specialized and distributed in man. 65 There is also a world of meaning in the enormous development of the canine tooth in the male gorilla or orang: all the more clearly from their being frugivores, it is a weapon which Showing the great canines in the latter (Orang). marks the brute. 66 If we consider, besides, the climatic limitations, so rigidly imposed on the quadrumana, derivation from the dog will seem as credible as from the ape. The dog, like his master, is a citizen of the world, and can be acclimatised everywhere. But the ape is chained to the tropics; 67 and could no more diffuse his offspring throughout the Temperate latitudes than man himself could colonize the peaks of the Alps, or found flourishing cities at the North Pole. F 31. Tried then by the appropriate tests, Mr. Darwin's scheme is found wanting. To a fair hearing he is amply entitled. True, his doctrine is fatal-there is no use concealing it-to what has hitherto been revered as Divine Revelation: Man, when he dies, has as much to fear or to hope for as his kinsman and congener the gorilla, and no more. That is consequence the first. The speculation, moreover, is such as may excuse, on the face of it, a measure of distrust and shrinking; for the creed would change in most minds the code of duty, and conviction of a bestial origin and fate would not ordinarily yield the fruits of even a feeble and flickering faith in rank but a little lower than the angels. That is consequence the second. Mr. Darwin does not deduce these consequences: with instinctive loyalty to a better culture, he studiously abstains from drawing them, and even, indirectly, deprecates their being drawn.68 Nevertheless he has touched to the quick the problem pressing through all time on all souls for solution: "What is life, and what ought I to live for? Is man a spiritual nature, surviving the grave, or simply the chief animal, and death the last of him?" The question at issue bears all the burden of the chasm that parts the creed of Lucretius from that of St. Paul. "Lying on the infinite bosom of nature, the Greek was yet unsatisfied. Had you asked his highest wish, he would have replied, 'This world, if it would only last, I ask no more.' Its revels, its dances, its races, its academic groves, these were blessedness; and the Greek's hell was death." 69 Would the case be otherwise with a modern to whom a future life had become a brain-sick phantom, and the Deity practically undistinguishable from the aggregate of physical laws? Or if otherwise with the very few whom the accidents of a refined temperament and a noble culture kept a class by themselves, would it rest with this or the other lettered recluse to lay reins on the fierce logic of the multitude? The creed that man is ape-born, speaking generally, where it made a disciple would not miss an interpreter. Did it ever pass from the brain of imaginative savans into the heart and belief of a people, no shrinking on the part of its authors could stay its mission-could prevent its stamping a sordid utilitarianism as the sole wisdom of life, and Sauve qui peut as the whole duty of man; lending ruthless oppression its ready salvo, and successful chicane its absolving gospel. But this is a digression. Consequences, whether agreeable or disagreeable, have no legitimate voice, it |