must be carefully borne in mind, in the determining of scientific fact. No consequences will make that which is true false, or that which is false true. If man is a transmuted ape, no brilliancy of ridicule, or felicity of sarcasm, will upset the proof, or dissolve the pedigree. Mr. Darwin did not make nature; he only interprets it; and so he does not misinterpret, no fault can be found, however startling or saddening the facts may be. "What is actually true it is always most desirable to know, whatever consequences may arise from its admission;" 70 and truth is not the contortion of things by thought, but the conformity of thought with things. Let the truth then be reached, though the heavens fall; only, when it is a case of the heavens falling, be we very sure it is truth that brings them down. Do then the observed or recorded phenomena of species supply any solid groundwork for Mr. Darwin's speculation? Does it decipher aright the function of the struggle for subsistence? Does it allow due force to the laws of limitation and equilibrium, so critically coinciding with the pervading rule of nature as to animal sterility and productiveness? Does it account for the predetermined life-cycle in different species; the "septuma æstas" or the threescore' and ten? Has it any animal to show,

lifted by either natural or artificial means out of its own sphere? Does it tally with the testimony of the rocks? Does it take account of the equivalence of scale to time? Does it vanquish the infinitely ramified proof of design in the structures and instincts of animals; and succeed in converting creative endowments into fortuitous acquirements? Can we descry with clearness in the vista of the future, by putting on the spectacles of natural selection, here a race of superhuman men, and there a race of super-simian apes ? Have we lighted on the true apology for the basest shapes of historical superstition when we discover that the Egyptian monkey-worship" was an innocent memorial of

ancestors? Are Homer, and Plato, and Pascal, and Shakspeare, to be looked back on and looked down on by the coming masters of the earth, as we look back on the mammoth or the mastodon; and shall it be the chosen pastime of the sages of the future to

Admire such wisdom in so mean a shape,

And show a Newton as we show an ape?

Or, conversely, must we accept it, as matter of unerring prediction, that, supposing the scene cleared of their human competitors, only time is required for the dawning of a new and splendid civilization, guaranteed by

the action of infallible laws, and the hope-inspiring aptitudes of the gorilla and the orang? All products of art, language, science-the city, the minster, the university; the steam-ship, the telegraph, the printingpress; the sculpture lining the walls of the British Museum, the thought garnered in a million volumes beneath its dome-all this latent in the chimpanzee, potentially restorable from the baboon! Strike out all moral concern from the questions: the verdict of the Scientific Reason must surely nevertheless be, No.

32. Mr. Darwin himself reels and recoils in presence of these enormous incredibilities. But he reassures himself in some such fashion as this. My choice is between two alternatives. As a scholar of Bacon and Newton, I desiderate a vera causa for living things. Natural selection is such; creative agency is not. The one may be improbable: I own it is loaded with immense embarrassments, some of which I cannot even touch, far less remove but the other is altogether chimerical. Would you really have me believe that "at innumerable periods in the earth's history, certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues." 72

33. Darwinianism, like earlier schemes of development, is born of a difficulty; and this is that difficulty,

never more clearly or frankly put than in these few words. Pantheism is here packed into a nutshell: the seen is the measure of the possible; what this or the other man can conceive is the limit of what Deity can do! "Flash intelligence in a second across the Atlantic!" how confidently, some twenty years ago, the mass of civilized mankind, in the measurement of the power of a fellow-creature, would have poured scorn on the mention of such a project! There are regions in which reticence is still more prudent, and temerity still more rash. Mr. Darwin has been sitting at wise men's feet; but he has failed to drink in the spirit of their teaching. Bacon, for instance, would have counselled him that it is better to rest in ignorance of one order of facts than to strain after a spurious knowledge by the distortion of another. Bacon would have warned him that the opposing a metaphysical perplexity to the witness of nature, and the torturing that witness into a means of solution, was disloyalty to the lessons of the inductive philosophy. Bacon, and not less sensitively Newton, would have shrunk from the implied antithesis which dethrones from the rank of Verified Cause the Causa causarum Himself, and passes by the Author of the Cosmos as a spectre of the brain. "I had rather believe all the

fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no farther; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate, and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity."73 The main business of natural philosophy

is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and to deduce causes from effects, till we come to the First Cause, which is certainly not mechanical.” 74

31. In shutting out the Creator, then, from direct or conscious causative agency in the Origin of Species, and contrasting ordinary causes as vera with the chimerical cause, GOD, the champions of transmutation are not fighting in the Baconian ranks, nor entitled to the shelter of the Baconian shield. Some things we know, and some we know not; but, if Bacon be our guide, we shall never contort the conquests of our knowledge in order to assuage the cravings of our ignorance. Into the workshop-the officina-of Deity we are not permitted to pry. Wisdom was with Him in the begin