THE JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, AND ANNALS OF ASTRONOMY, BIOLOGY, GEOLOGY, INDUSTRIAL ARTS, (MONTHLY, FORMERLY "THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE.") 3, HORSE-SHOE COURT, LUDGATE HILL. MDCCCLXXXII. SCIENCE. THE JOURNAL OF JANUARY, 1882. I. THE LAW OF EVOLUTION: IS IT GENERAL? HE truth of Evolution as a primary law of the Universe must to a great extent turn on its generality. If we see traces of its action-not demonstrable, but merely probable-in each class of phenomena which we successively examine, the difficulties in the way of its acceptance will be very much lessened. Now we find it beyond all dispute in the growth of the individual animal or vegetable from the germ to maturity. We say " beyond dispute," though we know a somewhat eccentric thinker who maintains that this development is an illusion, and that the infant, the boy, the youth, and the man are not four successive stages of one and the same being, but four distinct beings which succeed each other. Whether he puts forward this strange speculation as a mere dialectical exercise, or as a reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis of separate creation, we have never been able to feel satisfied. To return: we recognise Evolution, then, in the individual, in the nation, and in human society at large. In the animal and vegetable world we see good cause to accept it as the probable method in which those forms we call species have originated. Passing on to the other extremity of the scale, Evolution, as opposed to individual appearance, seems generally received as the process by which the heavenly bodies have taken their rise. It is not for this purpose necessary that we should accept the "nebular hypothesis," the cosmogony of Kant and La Place, and deduce suns and planets from the gradual condensation of a fire mist. The obvious difficulties which beset this hypothesis need not, as modern VOL. IV. (THIRD series.) 224172 B |