David Brewster

“ Under the tutelage of natural selection, it is advancing to a state of perfection, short only of the absolute, and some time or other that goal must be reached. Declining to receive light from above, how is the speculative philosopher to close the history of life which he has traced through such singular transformations? The physical astronomers of no distant age believed that all the planets of our system, moving in a resisting medium, were necessarily approaching to the sun, and would finally perish in its blaze. ”

“ As natural selection can produce every degree of perfection but absolute perfection, instinct must have risen into reason, and since, as Mr. Darwin remarks, “ a little dose of judgment or reason often comes into play even in animals very low in the scale of creation," a greater dose of judgment or reason, such as that exhibited in the exercise of the "primary mental powers," must be accumulating in the human family in the course of their development. What then is to be the future of man in his physical, mental, and moral nature? To what form of being is the primordial atom to rise? ”

“ In order to explain how two very distinct species, as in the preceding cases, are furnished with the same anomalous organ, Mr. Darwin expresses the following extraordinary opinion:—"I am inclined to believe that in nearly the same way as two men have sometimes independently hit on the very same invention, so natural selection, working for the good of each being and taking advantage of analogous variations, has sometimes modified in very nearly the same manner two parts in two organic beings, which owe but little of their structure in common the same ancestor." ”

“ Darwin tells us that "in North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely- opened mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water ;" and he adds, "even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by natural selection more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstruous as a whale"! ”

“ The uncorrected colour is never seen in using that organ, and consequently the human eye, as the organ of vision, is perfect, and therefore not the result of natural selection. Upon Mr. Darwin's principle the ear is not perfect, because it is insensible to the music of the spheres or the lense imperfect because it cannot discover every shade of colour. An over-sensitive ear would be destroyed by the sounds to which nature subjects it, and a touch sensitive to colour would be torture to its possessor. ”

“ Natural selection, however, under Mr. Darwin's guide, may reconcile these difficulties, and the eye of the future may be furnished with crystalline lenses doubly or triply achromatic. Our author himself sometimes stands aghast before his own opinions. He declares that "the belief that an organ so perfect as the eye could have been formed by natural selection is more than enough to stagger any one;" but what can he say when he learns what he ought to have known, that the lens of the cuttle-fish, one of the earliest of animals, is as perfect and more complex even than that of man. ”

“ Darwin, species are so changed that, since the first act of creative power, man has risen from a primordial atom, through the numerous stages of plant, fish, fowl, and quadruped. If this speculation has any evidence to support it, it will be found in the history of organized beings during the several thousand years of the historic period. In the course of this long period, no change of species has taken place and no new species has appeared. ”

“ Darwin's speculations it will be seen that he has not adduced a single fact in its support. Had our limits permitted us to give some of the natural history details and experimental results which his work contains, we should have found that though they prove the existence of small variations in species, a fact admitted by every preceding naturalist, yet the small amount of these variations, both in number and character, establish the very truth which they are adduced to overturn. ”

“ Darwin himself and his only reply to them is, that more time is wanted than the age of Egyptian tombs, or even that of the coral reef, for the transmutations which he advocates. Fortunately for our argument, there have been more animals ambalsmed than those of Egypt. The plants and animals which nature has preserved in the cementeries of primeval times speak the same language as those in the Egyptian tombs, and we must now appeal to them in search of any evidence of a transmutation of species. ”

“ Darwin devotes his first chapter to the changes produced in plants and animals "under domestication." These changes, which are universally admitted, he ascribes to difference of climate and treatment during several generations, the variations increasing with the time, and, when once begun, continuing for many generations. "No case," he says, “is on record of a variable being ceasing to vary under cultivation. Our oldest cultivated plants, such as wheat, still often yield new varieties ; our oldest domesticated animals are still capable of rapid improvement or modification." ”

“ The comparative anatomist, the physiologist, and the botanist, will discover their nature and extent, and, instead of finding in them the materials of a wild speculation, they will see and admire the beautiful provision which has been made for enabling the various species of animal and vegetable life to adapt themselves to the different conditions in which civilization may have placed them. ”

“ Though the large runt pigeon, with its massive beak and its huge feet, differs from its blue and barred progenitor the rock, it is a pigeon still. Though the slender Italian greyhound has a strange contrast with the short-legged bull-dog, they are both dogs in their teeth and in their skull. The mouse, even, has not been transmuted into the cat, nor the hen into the turkey, nor the duck into the goose, nor the hawk into the eagle, and still less the monkey into the man. ”

“ The existence of such creatures as the trilobites and the cephalopods or cuttle-fishes in the Silurian formations, with organs of sensation of the most perfect kind, is an unanswerable difficulty in the development theory.
Mr. Darwin is sorely puzzled with the transition of organs. "Natural selection," he says "will not produce absolute perfection, nor do we always meet with this high standard under nature. The correction for the aberration of light is said, on high authority, not to be perfect even in that most perfect organ, the eye." ”

“ Owing to the great rapidity with which plants and animals increase and multiply, the earth would soon be covered by their progeny, if numbers of them were not destroyed during some period of their lives. Hence there is "a struggle for existence," during which superfluous life is taken, and the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply, while those of feebler constitutions, incapable of providing for themselves and their offspring, must annually perish.
In this war of races, this struggle for food and existence, favourable variations are preserved, and injurious ones rejected ”

“ Darwin has been long known to the public as an eminent naturalist. He is the grandson of the celebrated Dr. Darwin, a poet and a physiologist, and the author of several ingenious works, in some of which he traced the origin of all organized beings, plants, animals, and even man, to living filaments, susceptible of irritation. ”

“ The dumb animal might teach the philosopher that unity of kind or of species is discoverable under the strongest masks of variation."
Our limits will not permit us to follow our author in his attempt to show that great changes take place under the principle of artificial selection, where domestic races have been produced by man, in accumulating in certain directions useful to him, the successive variations produced by nature. ”

“ A much more powerful cause of variation he finds in what he calls Natural Selection, or the power which Nature exercises “in rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good, and silently and insensibly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being, in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. ”

“ It has no other title, however, but that which breathed life into one primordial form, from which all organic beings have been descended that have ever lived upon this earth — plant, fish, fowl, quadruped, and man! ”

“ Darwin's work, On the Origins of Species, our readers will understand that it contains much valuable knowledge, and much wild speculation. Interesting facts and idle fancies have seldom been combined in physical researches, and when such an alliance has been formed, the value of the new facts has often compensated for the errors of their application. ”

“ The theory of the origin of species is but an offset from the the Nebular Cosmogony which pretends to explain the origin and formation of the primary and secondary planets, and which stands in direct contradiction to all the facts and laws of the solar system, and especially those of the system of comets. ”

“ He denies that life began in the lower Silurian strata. He believes that there must be strata much older than the azoic formations, or those without life ; and in order to explain why, among fossil remains, none of the species are found which form the links between one race and another, he conjectures that the formations which contain them have been removed by denudation, and other causes, and may exist beneath the ocean, or in localities not yet explored by geologists. ”

“ That tender Parent who longs to gather His children "as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wing;" who opens when they knock; who gives good things to them that ask him, and without whose knowledge not a hair of their head falls to the ground, takes no charge of the family of orphans who people the gloomy universe of our author. ”

“ Darwin endeavours to establish are contained in the following passage at the end of his work:—"I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead one step farther, namely, to the belief that all animals have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. ”

“ The Influence thus acknowledged, is the electric spark of previous speculator which disappears for ever, when it has lighted the train of causes and effects by which all the orders of organic life have been fashioned and perpetuated. ”

“ When God saw that every living creature which he made was good, we cannot doubt that the type of each of them was perfect. The struggle for life, therefore, is to present, and not to promote a change in the original form. ”

“ In reference to the great geological truth that the earlier formations, stretching over vast extent, and perfectly unaltered, do not contain the least traces of organized beings, and that the dawn of life is in the lower Silurian formation, our author admits that "if his theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer, than the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day, and that during these vast yet quite unknown periods of time the world swarmed with living creatures." ”

“ It can modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young ; but it cannot modify the structure of one species without giving it any advantage for the good of another species. "If it had to make the beak of a full-grown pigeon very short for the bird's own advantage, the process would be slow, and there would be simultaneously the most vigorous selection of the young birds within the egg, which had the most powerful and hardest beaks, for all with weak beaks would inevitably perish ”

“ In what gardeners call "sporting plants," where a single bud or offset assumes a new and sometimes "very different character from that of the rest of the plant;" and such "sports," which are very common under cultivation, support our author's view, that variations are not necessarily connected with the act of generation. Slight changes may also be produced from "the conditions of life," such as increased size from amount of food, colour from particular kinds of food, and perhaps thickness of fur from climate ”

“ There are many cases, indeed, in the history of science, where speculations, like those of Kepler, have led to great discoveries in the very attempts which they suggested in order to establish or to refute them. ”

“ Instead, therefore, of there being "a constant tendency in the improved descendants of any one species, to supplant and exterminate in each stage of descent their predecessors, and their original parent," there will be the very opposite tendency to preserve unimpaired the relative perfection which that species received from the Creator's hand. ”

“ The strong tiger that survives the struggle will have more of its native ferocity than its sickly congener that has perished. The vigorous buffalo will not cease to be herbivorous in consequence of its strength ”