not only Mr Darwin's laborious extravagances but Mr Murray's germs, and imaginary laws of nature, and fabulous' developments.'

With Mr Murray's reasons for not assenting to Mr Darwin's machinery of change, as expressed in the following words, we shall all be disposed to agree.

'What impressed me more than anything else was the absence of any transitional form or geological evidence in support of this idea. I argued that if such transition really existed, it ought to have been seen or to have left traces of its having been, but no form has as yet been discovered among fossil remains, which can be fairly adduced, as showing a gradation of form passing, during the course of time, from one species to another,' &c., &c. (5).

Thus, then, even the Transmutationists hurl the rocks against Mr Darwin, and overwhelm him with the mountains. There is intestine war amongst the Giants themselves. They would scale the heavens, but they cannot agree amongst themselves. The labourers in this great Babel have different languages and cannot act in harmony. Their tongues have been confounded. There is division in the camp, and with division hopeless and irremediable discomfiture. Nevertheless, though each of these teachers of the School of Transmutation has his own Theory, and though no two of them agree, yet in one particular there is harmony amongst them, in the usage of a vague language for the furtherance of their Theories, an unsubstantial dialect, with which it is impossible to grapple.

The favourite phrase with the School, in which indeed some of them mask their whole Theory, is 'development;' and of this we have said more in another page. In Mr Murray's system it is indeed everything. When he wants to produce a new animal out of a dormant germ, the germ has been 'developed.' He tells us with much gravity that the whales of the arctic and antarctic species were 'developed' in the Meiocene period (212).

The developing of a whale must have been no trifling matter, and we ought to hear something of the process, as from what it was developed, and by what particular mode. But this is left unexplained, and development' is made to act as a sort of thimble-rig of physiological conjurers, and to produce the required change under the hat of mystery. A herring, perhaps, is put under the hat-presto!—the hat is removed, and lo! a whale!

The whale, indeed, seems to be the great bait to catch the philosophers of this School. We know its success in Mr Darwin's case, and its attractions have been irresistible for Mr Murray. But seriously, all this

That this is a process seriously contemplated by the author we see in the following passage, which, if professedly written to ridicule the Transmutationists, might be thought too broad a caricature:

The origin of marine animals by descent, in other words, their derivation or parentage, has always appeared to me one of the most difficult problems to solve. How a terrestrial animal could ever give birth to a seal or a whale-how it could ever nurse or feed it, naturally makes us pause and wonder. The very first and most essential qualification of a common medium in which to live seems wanting; when we come,

affords a most instructive lesson to us, that when learned physiologists forsake the legitimate path of facts, to indulge in the pursuit of hypothesis, they fall into mistakes palpable even to the illiterate. Curious, indeed, it is to observe that these interpreters of nature, whose sceptical logic will not admit the idea of a Creator, can, with such perfect self-complacency, indulge in a language which represents no recognized fact, and expresses nothing but a coinage of the imagination to conceal unacknowledged ignorance.

'Development-germs--the operation of a general law-Natural Selection,' &c., &c., &c. Assertions like these, resting on no proof, and incapable of being proved, are quietly assumed as the solid materials for their hypothesis. They argue on them as if they were realities, and seem to persuade themselves that they have by their instrumentality produced a new system, which is to be a substitute for the received opinions and firm belief of all the common sense of mankind; and thus, to use the caustic language of Dr Johnson, 'these persons are weary of the oldfashioned practice of milking the cow, and so they go to milk the bull.'

however, to think of the steps and processes by which this creation (sic) may have been effected, we find ourselves wholly at sea without compass or rudder. We do not even know at which end to commence our speculation. Were the aquatic animals descended from the terrestrial or the terrestrial from the aquatic? although the probabilities seem in favour of the former, there is no fact known which shuts out the possibility of the seals having been in existence before the carnivora. The latter is the most natural theory, because it seems to stand to reason that the exceptional form should be derived from the normal rather than the reverse; although if pressed for a reason why one should be considered more normal than the other, I must candidly confess that I have none to give, except the very lame one that now the one is more numerous than the other' (123).

After some more musings on this deep question, the learned author inclines to think that the bear was the lineal ancestor of the seal (125). What amphibious carnivora have we then of bulk approaching to the seal? none but the bear.'

So bulk carries it, and the bear produced a germ which produced a seal.

If we were students of this sort of genealogy, we should be disposed to conjecture that the seal produced the bear, for this simple reason, that the polar bear mostly feeds on seals, and indeed could not exist without them. The food necessary for its existence must have preceded its existence, and thus it will come to pass that the bear eats his

ancestors.

The reader will remember that in Mr Darwin's system the bear is progenitor of the whale; so that altogether bears and whales seem destined to be pierres d'achoppement for the learned Professors of the School of Transmutation.

APPENDIX C.

Professor Göppert on the Darwinian Theory.

IN the August month of the Journal of Botany is an interesting paper by Professor H. R. Göppert, translated from the Nova Acta of the Imperial German Academy Naturæ Curiosorum.

The title of this essay is 'On Aphyllostachys, a new genus of fossil plants of the Calamites group, and on the relation of the Fossil Flora to Darwin's Theory of Transmutation.'

The learned Professor first notices Dr Hooker, who, in his 'Tasmanian Flora,' has adopted the Theory of the Transmutationists. Nevertheless, Dr Hooker, it seems, does not find much to encourage him in his floral studies. He holds that, regarded from the classificatory point of view, the geological history of plants is not so favourable to the Theory of progressive development as that of animals, because the earliest ascertained types are of such large and complex organization, and because there are no known fossil plants which can certainly assume to belong to a nonexisting class, or even family, and none that are ascertained to be intermediate in affinity between recent classes and families.'

Dr Hooker also acknowledges the absence of genuine monocotyledonous plants in the ancient flora, and all this from an advocate is a serious admission.

Professor Göppert holds that our knowledge of fossil plants is amply sufficient to supply decided proofs' that there are no genetic relations in the geological history of plants such as the Transmutationists would require. He urges also that a high importance must be accorded to those species of plants, and to the more numerous animals, which have passed from the Tertiary period to our own time, and still more to those which have existed unaltered through three periods, as the Neuropteris Lostici, which ranges from the lower coal formation, through the upper to the Permian. If we add to this,' says the Professor, 'the numerous families and genera which have remained unaltered since their first appearance, so that the same characters can be used for the definition of the different species that occur in all the geological periods, it is difficult to perceive where the mutations are to be found, which the different species are said to have undergone.'

The Professor then urges that in the very earliest times of the land Flora certain groups of plants, for instance, the Ferns, appear in a degree of perfection, previous to the gradual development of which an enormously long range of time, and numberless autetypes (which, however, are entirely wanting) would be required in the Darwinian Theory. Besides this some groups become extinct at very early geological periods, leaving

to subsequent periods only faint remnants or indications of their former degree of perfection.

A few orders and families attain, on their first appearance, a high degree of development, and retain this down to the present time; this applies to the oldest family, the Algæ. Other orders, as, for instance, the Coniferæ, which began with the Abietineæ, as early as the Palæozoic period appeared in such diversity of form, and high internal structure, as in no subsequent period.

The Cycadeæ also, of the Permian formation, attained an organism of a higher stage of development than is observed in any Cycad before or since that time.

Quite isolated are the Sigillaria, and even without any further evidence they are quite sufficient, says the Professor, to support the dictum that certain forms were created only once, in certain geological periods, without the creative power being solicitous, as Darwin everywhere assumes, to ensure their further development.

He then observes that the vegetation of our globe commenced with Algæ, but one would make a mistake in supposing that the lowest forms appeared first and isolated.' This is by no means the case, for with the lowest unicellular Algæ, the higher Florideæ co-existed, and even a Callithamnion.

The Fungi are of a lower grade than the Algæ, and we meet with them first on Ferns of the coal period. The other cellular plants are entirely wanting in Palæozoic strata, they make their appearance only in the Tertiary period, and perhaps they have not existed earlier.

'In a strict succession, according to the Theory of Progressive Development, there is here a serious break-down.'

All the lower stages of the vegetable kingdom, cellular plants, higher Cryptogains, Monocotyledons, and even Gynosperms, already existed in the Palæozoic period, but the appearance of genuine Dicotyledons has still to be discovered. In the Cretaceous formation, however, genuine leafDicotyledons appear, and there is from that time a constantly increasing approximation towards the Flora of the present time; and this proceeds, until, in the Tertiary period, the balance is turned, and the living forms predominate.

'If, as I believe, nothing can be said against the correctness of these views-based as they are, not upon conjecture or mere examination of external appearances (most deceptive in fossil plants), but upon internal structural differences one is at a loss to comprehend how all these very different forms can have descended in a direct line from each other, and, as a necessary consequence of such a theory, from one primordial form ; or how they can have been developed into the present diversified form of life by undergoing a constant mutation of hereditary peculiarities, by individual variations, by struggles for existence, and by Natural Selectionthe principal dogmas of the Darwinian Theory.

Under these circumstances, it will be granted that the doctrine of Transmutation receives no more support from the fossil flora, than it does (as Reuss has shown most convincingly) from the fossil fauna.'

'IN every division of animated nature, even of comparatively limited extent, are to be found species which, although agreeing in all their chief structural characters with the types of such groups, exhibit in their general form and appearance so great a resemblance to the members of some other group, that by ordinary observers they are at once regarded as belonging to the latter, and not to their own legitimate group. Thus, an eel resembles a snake more than a fish, a cuckoo resembles a hawk, a humming-bird hawk-moth so nearly resembles a humming-bird that a person who had seen the Trochilidæ in their American haunts could not be brought to believe that one of the moths which he happened to have noticed in Oxfordshire was an insect. This kind of external resemblance has been termed Analogy, and was greatly used by M'Leay and Swainson in the development of their respective "Systems of Nature." More recently this resemblance has been termed "Mimicry," and some very remarkable instances of it have been described and figured by Mr Bates, occurring in certain species of butterflies which frequent the banks of the river Amazon and other parts of South America in vast numbers, both of species and individuals, forming a separate family, the Heliconiidæ, distinguished by their very peculiar elongated wings, as well as by their distinct styles of colouring. These butterflies are, it appears, accompanied in their flight by certain other species of butterflies, which so closely resemble them in general form and colour as to be scarcely distinguishable from them, although belonging to a totally different family, the Pierida, of which our common white butterfly, Pieris brassica, is the type. According to Mr Bates, the Heliconians emit a disagreeable scent, which renders them distasteful to insectivorous birds, and so preserves them in the "battle of life;" and he moreover assumes that their mimics, the Pieridans, have, by a long process of development from the old typical white, broad-winged form of their own family, attained that of the well-todo Heliconians, and have thereby been enabled to improve their condition and maintain their existence in nature.