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edition) Professor Kölliker, than whom there is no greater authority in embryology. This German says, "Great weight must be attached to the objection brought forward by Huxley, otherwise a warm supporter of Darwin's hypothesis, that we know of no varieties which are sterile with one another, as is the rule among sharply distinguished animal forms. If Darwin is right, it must be demonstrated that forms may be produced by selection, which, like the present sharply distinguished animal forms, are infertile when coupled with one another; and this has not been done."

What, now, does Professor Huxley himself say, speaking before scholars, and in reply to this passage? "The weight of this objection is obvious," is his answer; “but our ignorance of the conditions of fertility and sterility,"—which have been witnessed by man six thousand years, at least," the want of careful experiments extending over a long series of years, and the strange anomalies presented by the cross fertilisation of many plants, should all, as Mr. Darwin has urged, be taken into account in considering it." This is all he says, or that can be said, in reply to this objection.

Häckel asserts that sometimes hybrids are not, and five hundred other authorities, and all the proverbs of breeders, affirm that true hybrids are, sterile.

It is safe to say that evolutionists concede,

II. That natural selection cannot take leaps, and that therefore a multitude of links must have existed between man and the higher apes.

12. That after a diligent search, for nearly forty years, for traces of these missing links, none have been found.

13. That, in spite of all imperfections of the geological record, the destruction of these relics, without traces, is amazing, and that their absence leaves the argument for evolution weakest where it should be strongest.

14. That the oldest human fossils exhibit in essential characteristics no approach to the ape type.

"No remains of fossil man," says Professor Dana, in a most significant passage of his "Geology" (edition of 1875, p. 603), “bear evidence to less perfect erectness of structure than in civilised man, or to any nearer approach to the man-ape in essential characteristics. The existing man-apes belong to lines that reached up to them as their ultimatum; but, of that line which is supposed to have reached upward to man, not the first link below the lowest level of existing man has yet been found. This is the more extraordinary, in view of the fact, that, from the lowest limits in existing man, there are all possible gradations up to the highest; while below that limit there is an abrupt fall to the ape-level, in which the cubic capacity of the brain is one half less. If the links ever existed, their annihilation without trace is so extremely improbable, that it may be pronounced impossible. Until some are found, science cannot assert that they ever existed."

In regard to these missing links, Darwin himself says that their absence is amazing. Even Huxley says of what is unquestionably

a fair, average

one of the oldest fossil skeletons of man, that it has " human skull.” The lengths of the bones of the arm and thigh of the man of Mentone, one of the oldest human fossils yet discovered, have the proportions ordinarily found in man, and the skull is of excellent Caucasian type.1 The poorest fossil human brain is twice the cubic capacity of the best ape brain.2

It must be noticed that evolutionists admit,—

15. That, if any animal can be shown to possess organs or peculiarities of no use to it in the struggle for existence, the theory of natural selection breaks down.

16. That the hairlessness of man was not only of no use, but was a disadvantage, to him in the struggle for existence, and cannot be accounted for by natural selection, and must be accounted for by sexual selection.

17. That many animals possess péculiarities which, so far as we can see, can be of no use to them in the struggle for existence, and cannot be accounted for by any form of selection, natural or sexual.

In his "Descent of Man," published in 1871, Mr. Darwin himself makes these great concessions. "Natural selection," said Mr. Darwin in his "Origin of Species," published in 1859, " can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; it can never take a leap, but must advance by short and slow stages. If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Compare that extract with this: "I now admit, after reading the essay of Nägeli on plants, and the remarks by various authors with respect to animals, that, in the earlier editions of my 'Origin_of Species,' I probably attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest. I had not formerly sufficiently considered the existence of many structures which appear to be, as far as we can judge, neither beneficial nor injurious; and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my works." 3

It may be safely asserted that evolutionists concede,—

18. That whether the cause of variation is a force exterior or one interior to the modified organism, or a combination of these forces, is not known.

19. That it is probable that variation is due much more to some innate force in the modified organism than to anything outside of it. 20. That the influence of natural selection has been exaggerated; that it explains much, but not everything; that it deserves only a co-ordinate rank with sexual selection as the explanation of the origin of man; and that very possibly it should have a subordinate rank in contrast with yet unknown causes of variation.

"No doubt man, as well as every other animal," says the Charles Darwin of to-day," presents structures which, as far as we can judge with our little knowledge, are not now of any service to him, nor have

1 See Dana's Geology, frontispiece, and pp. 575, 577, and 603.

2 Ibid., 603.

Descent of Man, English edition, vol. i. p. 152.

been so during any former period of his existence, either in relation to his general conditions of life, or of one sex to the other. Such structures cannot be accounted for by any form of selection, or by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts." "1 "In the greater number of

cases we can only say that the cause of each slight variation and of each monstrosity lies much more in the nature or constitution of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions, though new and changed conditions certainly play an important part in exciting organic changes of all kinds." 2

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These astonishing modifications of his own theory by Darwin induce Professor St. George Mivart to assert in his "Lessons from Nature," a work which has but just crossed the Atlantic, that "the hypothesis of natural selection originally put forward as the origin of species has been really abandoned by Mr. Darwin himself, and is untenable. It is a misleading positive term, denoting negative effects, and, as made use of by those who would attribute to it the origin of man, is an irrational conception,"-"a puerile hypothesis." Any who remember Professor Huxley's article on Darwin's Critics, in "The Contemporary Review," for November 1871, will recall the strong terms in which he speaks of Mivart's scientific and philosophical competence. But Mivart holds nearly Professor Theophilus Parson's and Owen's creed, that species have originated by a force interior, and not exterior, to the modified organism. To that position Darwin draws nearer and nearer. Among Darwinians there seems to be a conspiracy of silence as to this fact. Darwinism is becoming Owenism. Darwin himself is not a good Darwinian.

God be thanked that this age takes nothing for granted! No: it does take one thing for granted,-its own superiority to all other ages; and yet one other thing,-that there are not more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in its philosophy. But, my friends, the scientific method requires, that, when we run up our list of causes, chemical, electrical, physical, mental, spiritual,-we should put at the top, to reach on into the infinite, another class, the unknown. Even in the nineteenth century, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

1 Descent of Man, vol. ii. p. 387.

2 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 388.

3 Professor St. George Mivart, Lessons from Nature, London, 1876, pp. 280-331.

III.

THE CONCESSIONS OF EVOLUTIONISTS.1

"The convertibility of the physical forces, the correlation of these with the vital, and the intimacy of that nexus between mental and bodily activity, which, explain it as we may, cannot be denied, all lead upward towards one and the same conclusion,-the source of all Power in mind; and that philosophical conclusion is the apex of a pyramid, which has its foundation in the primitive instincts of humanity."-Dr., W. B. CARPenter, Mental Physiology, chap. xx.

"Causation is the Will, Creation the Act, of God."-W. R. GROVE, Essay on the Correlation of Physical Forces.

THE small philosopher is a great character in New England. His fundamental rule of logical procedure is to guess at the half, and multiply by two. God be thanked for the diffusion of knowledge! God save us from the attendant temporary evils of arrogant sciolism in democratic ages! These are a necessary transitory stage in the progress of popular enlightenment which has just begun to dawn in this yet dim Western world. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; and it is our boast that, in America, every man has a little knowledge. We must drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; but every breathlessly hurried free citizen now is endeavouring, to his honour, to have a taste at least; and yet we know how mercilessly commerce and greed, and the toil for daily bread, wrench parched lips away from the deep draught. Full popular enlightenment is popular sanity; penumbral popular enlightenment is often popular insanity; and yet the penumbral must precede the full radiance. The small philosopher is always a great character under representative institutions. He seems destined to reign long on the earth, and often disastrously, and yet not for ever. We are an atrociously independent and as yet only a half-educated people. De Tocqueville said that individualism is the natural, and must often be a most mischievous, basis of democratic philosophy. To her great credit and to her great temporary mental distress, Massachusetts, in which popular enlightenment is more widely diffused than elsewhere, has probably just now more small philosophers than any other population of equal size on the globe. Emerson wrote of average Massa

1 The forty-eighth lecture in the Boston Monday Lectureship, delivered in the Meionaon

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chusetts as she was thirty years ago, "It is a whole population of ladies and gentlemen out in search of a religion." No doubt it is to our credit that we study the newspapers; but it is not to our credit that we do not better maintain the best ones, and that we do not sift newspaper information a little more warily, and that some of us think a man can be competently educated on the most trustworthy part of the daily press. We must destroy the faith of the people in the penny newspaper," I once heard Carlyle say in his study at Chelsea. I fathomlessly respect able and conscientious newspapers; I revere their majestic mission in history. I used to be told in Europe that Americans are governed by newspapers; and I was accustomed to answer, "No, gentlemen, not by newspapers, but by news-a very different thing." But, whether the shrewdest readers get at the news that is the most strategic in science, in politics, in art, in theology, by a hasty scramble through the midnight scribble of our cheaper dailies, is rather doubtful, or, rather, not doubtful at all. The most appropriate prayer, when one takes up the penny newspaper, is an invocation of the spirit of unbelief. But the best-used book of your small philosopher is the newspaper. He is unchurched in art, in science, in theology. He hears great names; he obtains glimpses of great truths; he puts half-truths in the place of systems that will bear the microscope; and when religious science occasionally gets his haughty hearing, it cannot on the Sabbath-day go into secular discussion with him, and you cannot hold his attention at first, except by secular discussion. You say that I am using this Lectureship very maladroitly, and that it is not wise to discuss here evolution and materialism. I do not speak to or for ministers or scholars, although they crowd this hall; I am talking to small philosophers.

Lord Bacon said that "truth emerges sooner from error than from confusion;" and, in the spirit of that remark, you will allow me to be analytical, and to number my propositions, in order that I may save time, and yet be distinct in a crowded discussion. Twenty concessions having been mentioned in a previous lecture, it is next to be noticed that it is notorious that evolutionists admit,

21. That life is incompatible with the gaseous state, or the state of fused metals.

22. That our present knowledge justifies the conclusion, that probably two hundred millions, and certainly five hundred millions, of years ago, the earth and the sun were in a fused state.

23. That neither two hundred nor five hundred millions of years are enough to account for the formation of plants and animals from primordial cells on the theory of the Darwinian transmutation.

These, gentlemen, are the outlines of what many men of science regard as the most serious of all objections to the hypothesis of evolution. This is the only difficulty to which Professor Huxley in his New York lectures condescended to reply, it is the most prominent of the objections which Häckel endeavours to refute in his recent daring work on "The History of Creation." I now hold in my hand this book, of which Darwin himself says, that its author

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