Asia, as well as of Atlantic North America, but all wanting in California; one Juglans like the walnut of the Old World, and another like our black walnut; two or three grapevines, one near our Southern fox grape or muscadine, another near our Northern frostgrape; a Tilia, very like our basswood of the Atlantic States only; a Liquidambar; a magnolia, which recalls our M. grandiflora; a Liriodendron, sole representative of our tulip-tree; and a sassafras, very like the living tree.

Most of these, it will be noticed, have their nearest or their only living representatives in the Atlantic States, and when elsewhere, mainly in Eastern Asia. Several of them, or of species like them, have been detected in our tertiary deposits, west of the Mississippi, by Newberry and Lesquereux. Herbaceous plants, as it happens, are rarely preserved in a fossil state, else they would probably supply additional testimony to the antiquity of our existing vegetation, its wide diffusion over the northern and now frigid zone, and its enforced migration under changes of climate.'

Concluding, then, as we must, that our existing vegetation is a continuation of that of the tertiary

1 There is, at least, one instance so opportune to the present argument that it should not pass unnoticed, although I had overlooked the record until now. Onoclea sensibilis is a fern peculiar to the Atlantic United States (where it is common and wide-spread) and to Japan. Prof. Newberry identified it several years ago in a collection, obtained by Dr. Hayden, of miocene fossil plants of Dakota Territory, which is far beyond it present habitat. He moreover regards it as probably identical with a fossil specimen "described by the late Prof. E. Forbes, under the name of Filicites Hebridicus, and obtained by the Duke of Argyll from the island of Mull."

period, may we suppose that it absolutely originated then? Evidently not. The preceding Cretaceous period has furnished to Carruthers in Europe a fossil fruit like that of the Sequoia gigantea of the famous groves, associated with pines of the same character as those that accompany the present tree; has furnished to Heer, from Greenland, two more Sequoias, one of them identical with a tertiary species, and one nearly allied to Sequoia Langsdorfii, which in turn is a probable ancestor of the common Californian redwood; has furnished to Newberry and Lesquereux in North America the remains of another ancient Sequoia, a Glyptostrobus, a Liquidambar which well represents our sweet-gum-tree, oaks analogous to living ones, leaves of a plane-tree, which are also in the Tertiary, and are scarcely distinguishable from our own Platanus occidentalis, of a magnolia and a tulip-tree, and "of a sassafras undistinguishable from our living species." I need not continue the enumeration. Suffice it to say that the facts justifiy the conclusion which Lesquereux -a scrupulous investigator-has already announced: that "the essential types of our actual flora are marked in the Cretaceous period, and have come to us after passing, without notable changes, through the Tertiary formations of our continent."

According to these views, as regards plants at least, the adaptation to successive times and changed conditions has been maintained, not by absolute renewals, but by gradual modifications. I, for one, cannot doubt that the present existing species are the lineal successors of those that garnished the earth in the old time before them, and that they were as well adapted to

their surroundings then, as those which flourish and bloom around us are to their conditions now.

Order

and exquisite adaptation did not wait for man's coming, nor were they ever stereotyped. Organic Nature-by which I mean the system and totality of living things, and their adaptation to each other and to the world— with all its apparent and indeed real stability, should be likened, not to the ocean, which varies only by tidal oscillations from a fixed level to which it is always returning, but rather to a river, so vast that we can. neither discern its shores nor reach its sources, whose onward flow is not less actual because too slow to be observed by the ephemera which hover over its surface, or are borne upon its bosom.

Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, and not long since to many, have so possessed the minds of the naturalists of the present day that hardly a discourse can be pronounced or an investigation prosecuted without reference to them. I suppose that the views here taken are little, if at all, in advance of the average scientific mind of the day. I cannot regard them as less noble than those which they are succeeding. An able philosophical writer, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, has recently and truthfully said:'

4

"It is a singular fact that, when we can find out how anything is done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did not do it. No matter how wonderful, how beautiful, how intimately complex and delicate has been the machinery which has worked, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for millions of ages, to bring about some beneficent result, if we can but catch a glimpse of the wheels its divine character disappears."

1"Darwinism in Morals," in Theological Review, April, 1871.

I agree with the writer that this first conclusion is premature and unworthy-I will add, deplorable. Through what faults or infirmities of dogmatism on the one hand, and skepticism on the other, it came to be so thought, we need not here consider. Let us hope, and I confidently expect, that it is not to last; that the religious faith which survived without a shock the notion of the fixity of the earth itself may equally outlast the notion of the fixity of the species which inhabit it; that, in the future even more than in the past, faith in an order, which is the basis of science, will not as it cannot reasonably-be dissevered from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion.

VI.

THE ATTITUDE OF WORKING NATURALISTS TOWARD DAR

WINISM.1

(THE NATION, October 16, 1873.)

THAT homely adage, "What is one man's meat is another man's poison," comes to mind when we consider with what different eyes different naturalists look upon the hypothesis of the derivative origin of actual specific forms, since Mr. Darwin gave it vogue and

1"Histoire des Sciences et des Sevants depuis deux Siècles, suivie d'autres études sur des sujets scientifiques, en particulier sur la Sélection dans l'Espèce Humaine, par Alphonse De Candolle." Genève : H. Georg. 1873.

"Addresses of George Bentham, President, read at the anniversary meetings of the Linnean Society, 1862-1873."

"Notes on the Classification, History, and Geographical Distribution of Compositæ. By George Bentham." Separate issue from the Journal of the Linnean Society. Vol. XIII. London. 1873.

"On Palæontological Evidence of Gradual Modification of Animal Forms, read at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, April 25, 1873. by Prof. W. H. Flower." (Journal of the Royal Institution, pp. 11.)

"The Distribution and Migration of Birds. Memoir presented to the National Academy of Sciences, January, 1865, abstracted in the American Journal of Science and the Arts. 1866, etc. By Spencer F. Baird."

"The Story of the Earth and Man. By J. W. Dawson, LL. D., F. R. S., F. G. S., Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University, Montreal. London: Hodder & Stoughton; New York: Harper & Brothers. 1873. Pp. 403, 12mo.