nothing in its character to put it beyond the pale of such investigation. Where, then, so little is positively known, and so much merely tentative and temporary, no one has a right to dogmatise*-far less to treat the earnest opinion of another otherwise than in the spirit of candour and respect. Argument is weak if it cannot divest itself of acrimony; truth is half shorn of her lustre when surrounded by a medium of angry invective. The development hypothesis, when pursued in a right spirit-in the spirit of inductive research and logical interpretation-is entitled to a fair hearing, even should it startle our accustomed beliefs and offend our prejudices. Science, confident in its strength, grapples with the argument; prejudice, feeling her weakness, avoids the combat, and, assassin-like, launches those infernal missiles" sceptic," "infidel," and "atheist." But whatever the uneasy tenderness with which the theme of Life is usually treated, its origin and progress, its incomings and outgoings, are questions which meet us at every turn in geology, and themes which no scientific naturalist can possibly ignore. Year after year they are being more forcibly pressed upon our attention, and no geologist can afford to stand by while the brunt of the battle must be met on the ground of his own special science. Lamarck's well-known hypothesis the Vestiges of Creation, which stands bastardised by the moral cowardice that shrinks from avowing its paternity—and Mr Darwin's Origin of Species-have each given a fresh impetus to the question; and though our limits debar any further discussion of the question, we may be permitted to express our opinion, that be it "trans

* "In respect to very many questions, a wise man's mind rests long in a state neither of belief nor of unbelief. But your intellectually shortsighted people are apt to be preternaturally clear-sighted, and to find their way very plainly to positive conclusions upon one side or the other of every mooted question."-Dr ASA GRAY, in his Review of the Darwinian Hypothesis.

mutation under the influence of external conditions”—“ development through the force of maternal volition on the embryotic organism"-or, "natural selection in the struggle for existence," neither of them (even were they true to the extent their advocates argue) ascends any higher than a mere subordinate factor in the law of vital development. We are far from denying the influence of such causes on the diversity of life. On the contrary, unprejudiced inquiry is constrained to rank them among the activities of the Creator's plan, but simply as secondary activities, limited alike in their power and in the range of their applicability. Thus, however, it ever is: we discover a cause where several others are equally operative and potent, and our ignorance or enthusiasm is but too prone to ascribe to the one what is ascribable alike to the others that remain undetected and undetermined.

Even Mr Darwin, wedded as he is to the theory of Natural Selection, is constrained to admit the operation of several activities in the law of vital diversity. 66 "It is in

teresting," he says, in one of the most genial passages in his work, "to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that those elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being growth by reproduction; inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduction; variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from

the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving-namely, the production of the higher animals-directly follows. There is grandeur

in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Here then, according to his own showing, inheritance, external conditions, use and disuse, struggle for life, and natural selection, are all fulfilling their parts as co-factors in one great law, and it is strange that in the face of this admission he should labour to ascribe to one cause what would have been much more philosophically and satisfactorily ascribed to the many. He admits, too, the "original breathing of life into a few forms or into one form," and yet unaccountably appeals throughout his argument to chance and nature for all subsequent development, as if these blind deities were aught without the direction of the same original life-breathing Impulse! If science is constrained to admit a Divine origination of life, why should she be ashamed to confess to an equally Divine sustaining of its subsequent manifestations ? If we are compelled to invoke a creative act for a beginning we cannot comprehend, why should we shrink from appealing to the same cause for subsequent diversities we cannot explain? But for this weakness or vanity, the erroneous in these so-called "theories of life" had met with a kindlier tolerance, and the true with a readier acceptance.

If, as these theorists assert, the question be merely this : Has or has not the Creator endowed inorganic matter with the power of assuming, under the influence of certain forces, an organic form? and has or has not the Creator further ordained that under certain external phases of nature these

forms shall be transmuted into other and altered forms of organisation? then the subject assumes a purely physical aspect, and they are bound, like the mathematician and chemist, to prove their case by the ordinary rules of physical induction. Given the scales, fins, and gills of a fish—what the conditions and what the amount of time necessary to transmute them into the scutes, paddles, and lungs of a marine reptile? Given the scutes, membranous fore-arms, and stomach of a flying reptile-what the phases of change and what the amount of time required for their transformation into the feathers, wings, and gizzard of a bird? Or, given the four hands with partially opposable thumbs, the low facial angle, and the jabbering half-reasoning instinct of a monkey-what the force of conditions, and what the term of time for their development into the two-handed dexterity, the erect aspect, and the eloquent ratiocinations of a philosopher of the nineteenth century? If the question

be one of purely physical import, such are the formulæ the developists are called upon to frame, and such are the problems that await their solution. This task they have hitherto failed to accomplish; and as yet the place of sterling proof is usurped by plausible assumption. The evolution of life, however, in all its multifarious forms and aspects-its cosmical functions and relationships-its orderly appearings and disappearings at certain geological periods - its bearings on the intellectual and moral position of Man -all this and much more that instinctively interweaves itself with our innermost thoughts of time and destiny, must surely rest on a broader and deeper foundation. It is-if anything we shall ever comprehend the gradual unfolding of a predestined plan, the expression of a Divine thought, which it is our high privilege as well as duty to interpret; but depend on it, we altogether err in our method of interpretation if we attempt to associate life

with physical agency in any other way than the mere medium through which creative power has chosen to manifest itself to our observation. In vain does Mr Darwin taunt that this is a mere "dignified way" of putting the question better surely to rest satisfied with a dignified belief we are unable to prove, than seek unsatisfactory shelter under a cold undignified materialistic assumption! For our own part, believing as we do that Life in all its relations its incomings and outgoings in time-its modifications in form, and its distribution over space-are under the incessant operation of fixed and determinable laws, we are as free to entertain the question of vitality as we are to entertain the formation of a stratum of sandstone or the aggregation of a mineral crystal; but this we cannot do unless at every stage of our reasoning we associate a superintending with a creative intellect. And we have yet to learn wherein the variation of a natural law, or the variation of a well-known form of life-even to the tenthousandth degree-is less an act of creation than the original establishment of that law, or the original calling of that life-form into existence.

[Advent of Man.]

The study of life, palæontologically regarded, necessarily involves the creation and first appearance of Man; and on this subject much discussion has taken place, unprofitable alike to science and the cause of Christian theology. So far as geological evidence goes, we have no traces of man or of his works till we arrive at the Superficial Accumulations the coral-conglomerates, the bone-breccias, the cavedeposits, and the peat-mosses of the current period. It is true, that so far as the earlier formations are concerned, the