no wise alter genera!" Nor yet have they been altered in the recorded memory of man. Whatever they may have been in the all-unknown, they are fixed now, and so have been always fixed, let us go back further than Rome, Greece, Egypt, India, China-to the "old artist" in the ice-age, or even beyond it if we can. Some two thousand five hundred years are not a yesterday; but when Solon, so long ago, referred to cocks, pheasants, and peacocks as ten thousand times more beautiful than the enthroned Croesus in his robes, the said cocks, pheasants, and peacocks were manifestly pretty well the same cocks, pheasants, and peacocks that they are now. Of man or beast the relics of Pompeii monotonously bring to us only identity, and not one jot less the buried mummies that were gorgeously alive in Egypt centuries and centuries. earlier. It has been already noted that the same dungbeetle that Mr. Darwin saw, Aristotle had already seen two thousand two hundred years before him. The latter could ask in his day, and we may ask in ours, why the nails of the fingers grow so much faster than the nails of the toes? why oil poured upon the sea composes it? why one end of an egg is harder than the other? or why olvov oivo Siaλveolai ("a hair of the dog," etc.)? He could tell us, too, that the Athenian boys knew how to quaver through paper on a reed, just as ours do; and no doubt the boys then, as they came out of the theatre from the representation of the "Frogs," shouted out, as they leaped over each others' backs, brekekekex, coax, coax, brekekekex, coax, coax, just as we may have known boys in London, or Liverpool, or elsewhere, similarly to leap and similarly to shout.1

1 By the "old artist" of course we mean him who sketched animals on horn 240,000 years ago, as Darwinians assert. That old artist, evidently, was essentially the same human being that we are. If he could sketch them on horn, he had, doubtless, his dog then too.

The continuity in space is but as the continuity in time. There, too, there are identities, or self-identities, each in its place. "The infinitude of the universe" (says Kant, WW. vi. 208) "embraces within it with equal necessity every nature that its transcendent wealth produces; from the highest class of thinking beings down to the most insignificant insect, there is not a single member of them all indifferent; not one can fail without a break in the harmony of the whole which consists in its community." "Indisputably, in the highest idea of reason," says Schelling, "the plant is predetermined; from idea to plant as necessary moment of it, there is a continuous progress."1 Plants and animals are considered by Erigena under the point of view of two different stages of the realisation of one and the same universal life. Of that universal life the esse, vivere, intelligere of the Middle Ages are but the natural unfoldings. There is but a single scene of reason, let contingency ramp as it may. Did the earth not rotate, for example, one half of it were frozen into futility as the other half to a like effect scorched. Mr. Darwin's sinuosities of accident, accumulations of chance, beside the eternal presence of allpervading purpose!

The tubercle he sees in the ear-proof of the original brute! Three Three pages, with an actual drawing, are devoted to this in the Descent of Man. A minute, almost imperceptible, inconstant nodule in the circumference of the external ear, this shall be but the original bestial ear-tip, only "folded in." Of another peculiarity in the ear he says this just in passing: "It has been asserted that the ear of man alone possesses a lobule; but a rudiment

1 How Mr. Darwin himself laments that quite a quantity of good food should be lost by disturbance, on the part of man, of "that chain by which so many animals are linked together "-see back propos of certain stercovora, at pp. 81, 82.

of it is found in the gorilla (Mivart); and, as I hear from Professor Preyer, it is not rarely absent in the negro." The lobule, as peculiar to man alone, has been long an understood fact; it is Mr. Darwin himself signalises the tubercle. They are the arms of the finger-post, and point contrariwise. What might secern man, Mr. Darwin almost ignores; but what would fling him to the beasts, inconstant and evanescent as it is, he cannot make enough of. Voltaire exclaimed of Rousseau and his Discours, "Never has there been so much wit expended to make beasts of us-one feels actually inclined to run on all-fours!" A hundred years later in date, any such exclamation would only have become a hundred times more relevant, had Voltaire lived to read Darwin.1

1 That Mr. Darwin, with more than microscopic eyesight to the tubercle, is purblind to the lobule, is less art than self-deception to wish. There is a tint of slyness in the Mivart.

CHAPTER XIII.

CRITICISM OF NATURAL SELECTION-THE BOOK ON THE

EMOTIONS."

MR. DARWIN is one of the few men who, since Linnæus, are of Linnæan fame. Even in botany, which is the express Linnæan field, Mr. Darwin's observation-and observation, again, is the express Linnæan faculty-is not by any means at its weakest, but, on the contrary, perhaps, almost keener, stronger, truer than anywhere else since the time when he wrote his Journal. Nevertheless, natural selection is Mr. Darwin's historical standpoint, and to that we confine ourselves. If we omit consideration of botany, however, it would hardly be right to conclude without a word on the specially relevant work that is named The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

What is called education, civilisation, progress, is largely artificial; and if there is anything that can still be called nature in man, it must lie as close as possible to his simple animality. Now that, plainly, is his instinctive expression of feeling; and so it was that the subject as a whole was in place for Mr. Darwin, who seems to have turned at once to his own domestic hearth as a field of observation. "My first child was born on December 27th, 1839, and I at once commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various expressions which he ex

hibited." This "at once," in the circumstances, jars; but it must not be supposed to precede or preclude, in such a man as Darwin, the awful new joy of fatherhood over his first-born, a male. "I felt convinced," he goes on

to say (i. 95), "even at this early period, that the most complex and pure shades of expression must all have had a gradual and natural origin." In a word, even at birth, he would see in the babe the brute. And yet the very first note of expression in his child-crying-had never possibly a prototype in any brute that ever was born!

It is thus Mr. Darwin commences. Nevertheless we still agree with Dr. Krause that the subject as a whole was in great part a suggestion to the grandson on the part of the grandfather (see Zoonomia, say i. 140-180). To the latter, for example, we have fear and its manifestation in this way: The new-born infant feels oppression for breath, and is struck by cold. It breathes short, it trembles; and fear is the expectation of similar disagreeable sensations afterwards. The tears and snivelling at birth, too, result from the action of the air on the lachrymal sac. Hence it is that we contract the forehead, bring down the eyebrows, and use many other contortions of the face to compress the sacs, establishing in this way the permanent language of grief. Still, with the child at birth, there is more than pain concerned; there is also pleasure. There is the warm, soft smoothness of the breast, and there is the fragrance of the milk. The latter tends also to irritate to tears. 'Hence the tender feelings of gratitude and love, as well as of hopeless grief, are ever after joined with the titillation of the extremity of the lachrymal ducts, and a profusion of tears." It is in a like spirit that lambs are spoken of. They "shake or wriggle their tails, at the time when they first suck, to get free of the first hardened