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can scarcely deny the fairness of Mr. Darwin's assumption that not only is the geological record imperfect, but we only have fragments of the last volume of it: an unknown series of preceding volumes having been lost or destroyed. In other words, he believes that before the Cambrian and Laurentian rocks were deposited there was life upon the globe; and we know that a nuinber of formations which may have contained the relics of that life must have been ground down to form those early stratified rocks, while others, equally ancient, have probably been so metamorphosed by heat as to have lost all trace of their original structure. It is certain that, if the world has been in existence long enough, and denudation, upheaval, and subsidence have always gone on, the earlier formations must have been so lost; and if we find a convergence backward of all forms of life towards simpler and more generalised types, and if we lose, one after another, the higher and more specialised groups (as we certainly do), then we have a right to claim a sufficiency of past time, wherein to lose successively all but the very lowest forms of life, and to follow out our converging lines of existence till they meet in the same remote point. For this the known formations will not suffice; and Mr. Darwin claims, as a reasonable assumption, an earlier series, which have left no recognisable proofs of their existence, but which, nevertheless, modern geologists are not disposed to deny him.

To those who accept the doctrine of the development of all organisms from pre-existing species by variation and survival of the fittest, the group of insects offers some most suggestive illustrations of the extreme remoteness of the origin of life upon our globe. Taking into consideration their strange metamorphoses, the isolation of the various groups, their complex and highly specialised structure, and their wonderfully diversified forms, no class of animals more impresses us with the immensity of the time required for their development. Yet when we go back as far as the period of the Lias, we find a number of the most highlyorganized groups, -as Elaterida and Carabidæ among the beetles, Gryllida among the Orthoptera, and Dragon-flies among the Neuroptera, already in existence. Still more extraordinary, in the remote carboniferous epoch, the insects that haunted the fern-groves and Sigillaria swamps were still of forms that can in some cases be classed in existing families, such as cockroaches, crickets, white ants, and such extremely specialised forms of beetles as Curculionidae and Scarabæida! If the development theory be true, these facts compel us to the conclusion that the ages since the carboniferous formation, vast though they are, can

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only be a small fraction of the whole period during which these complicated forms have been slowly evolved from the simpler Annulosa.

In adopting the views of Mr. Darwin, Sir Charles Lyell carries them out to their legitimate results, and does not shrink from the logical necessity, of the derivation of man from the lower animals; and he has written a very interesting chapter on the 'Origin and Distribution of Man.' Into this subject, however, we cannot now enter, except to remark briefly on some aspects of the question which all who have hitherto written upon it seem to have neglected.

It would certainly appear in the highest degree improbable, that the whole animal kingdom from the lowest zoophytes up to the horse, the dog, and the ape, should have been developed by the simple action of natural laws, and that the animal man, so absolutely identical with them in all the main features and many of the details of his organization, should have been formed in some quite other unknown way. But if the researches of geologists and the investigations of anatomists should ever demonstrate that he was derived from the lower animals in the same way that they have been derived from each other, we shall not be thereby debarred from believing, or from proving, that his intellectual capacities and his moral nature were not wholly developed by the same process. Neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution can give any account whatever of the origin of sensational or conscious life. They may teach us how, by chemical, electrical, or higher natural laws, the organized body can be built up, can grow, can reproduce its like; but those laws and that growth cannot even be conceived as endowing the newly-arranged atoms with consciousness. But the moral and higher intellectual nature of man is as unique a phenomenon as was conscious life on its first appearance in the world, and the one is almost as difficult to conceive as originating by any law of evolution as the other. We may even go further, and maintain that there are certain purely physical characteristics of the human race which are not explicable on the theory of variation and survival of the fittest. The brain, the organs of speech, the hand, and the external form of man, offer some special difficulties in this respect, to which we will briefly direct attention.

In the brain of the lowest savages, and, as far as we yet know, of the pre-historic races, we have an organ so little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest types (such as the average European), that we must believe it capable, under a similar process of gradual development during the space of two or three thousand years, of producing equal average results. But the mental requirements of the lowest savages, such as the Aus

.tralians

tralians or the Andaman islanders, are very little above those of many animals. The higher moral faculties and those of pure intellect and refined emotion are useless to them, are rarely if ever manifested, and have no relation to their wants, desires, or wellbeing. How, then, was an organ developed so far beyond the needs of its possessor? Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.

Again, what a wonderful or ganis the hand of man; of what marvels of delicacy is it capable, and how greatly it assists in his education and mental development! The whole circle of the arts and sciences are ultimately dependent on our possession of this organ, without which we could hardly have become truly human. This hand is equally perfect in the lowest savage, but he has no need for so fine an instrument, and can no more fully utilise it than he could use without instruction a complete set of joiner's tools. But, stranger still, this marvellous instrument was foreshadowed and prepared in the Quadrumana; and any person, who will watch how one of these animals uses its hands, will at once perceive that it possesses an organ far beyond its needs. The separate fingers and the thumb are never fully utilised, and objects are grasped so clumsily, as to show that a much less specialised organ of prehension would have served its purpose quite as well; and if this be so, it could never have been produced through the agency of natural selection alone.

We have further to ask-How did man acquire his erect posture, his delicate yet expressive features, the marvellous beauty and symmetry of his whole external form ;-a form which stands alone, in many respects more distinct from that of all the higher animals than they are from each other? Those who have lived much among savages know that even the lowest races of mankind, if healthy and well fed, exhibit the human form in its complete symmetry and perfection. They all have the soft smooth skin absolutely free from any hairy covering on the dorsal line, where all other mammalia from the Marsupials up to the Anthropoid apes have it most densely and strongly developed. What use can we conceive to have been derived from this exquisite beauty and symmetry and this smooth bare skin, both so very widely removed from his nearest allies? And if these modifications were of no physical use to him—or if, as appears almost certain in the case of the naked skin, they were at first a positive disadvantage-we know that they could not have been produced by natural selection. Yet we can well understand that

* See the admirable volume on the Hand,' by the late Sir Charles Bell, in the Bridgwater Treatise.

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both these characters were essential to the proper development of the perfect human being. The supreme beauty of our form and countenance has probably been the source of all our æsthetic ideas and emotions, which could hardly have arisen had we retained the shape and features of an erect gorilla; and our naked skin, necessitating the use of clothing, has at once stimulated our intellect, and by developing the feeling of personal modesty may have profoundly affected our moral nature.

The same line of argument may be used in connexion with the structural and mental organs of human speech, since that faculty can hardly have been physically useful to the lowest class of savages; and if not, the delicate arrangements of nerves and muscles for its production could not have been developed and coordinated by natural selection. This view is supported by the fact that, among the lowest savages with the least copious vocabularies, the capacity of uttering a variety of distinct articulate sounds, and of applying to them an almost infinite amount of modulation and inflection, is not in any way inferior to that of the higher races. An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor.

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This subject is a vast one, and would require volumes for its proper elucidation, but enough, we think, has now been said, to indicate the possibility of a new stand-point for those who cannot accept the theory of evolution as expressing the whole truth in regard to the origin of man. admitting to the full extent the agency of the same great laws of organic development in the origin of the human race as in the origin of all organized beings, there yet seems to be evidence of a Power which has guided the action of those laws in definite directions and for special ends. And so far from this view being out of harmony with the teachings of science, it has a striking analogy with what is now taking place in the world, and is thus strictly uniformitarian in character. Man himself guides and modifies nature for special ends. The laws of evolution alone would perhaps never have produced a grain so well adapted to his uses as wheat; such fruits as the seedless banana, and the bread-fruit; such animals as the Guernsey milch-cow, or the London dray-horse. Yet these so closely resemble the unaided productions of nature, that we may well imagine a being who had mastered the laws of development of organic forms through past ages, refusing to believe that any new power had been concerned in their production, and scornfully rejecting the theory that in these few cases a distinct intelligence had directed the action of the laws of variation, multiplication, and survival, for his own purposes. We know, however, that

this has been done; and we must therefore admit the possibility, that in the development of the human race, a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws for nobler ends.

Such, we believe, is the direction in which we shall find the true reconciliation of Science with Theology on this most momentous problem. Let us fearlessly admit that the mind of man (itself the living proof of a supreme mind) is able to trace, and to a considerable extent has traced, the laws by means of which the organic no less than the inorganic world has been developed. But let us not shut our eyes to the evidence that an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral

nature.

ART. IV.--English Statesmen since the Peace of 1815. By J. E. Kebbel, M.A. London, 1868.

W

E have so long been accustomed to Parliamentary Government, to regard it as an indisputable and exceptional blessing, to be proud of it and proud of ourselves for having it, and to look down with a kind of Pharisaic compassion and contempt upon all nations which have it not, that it will actually startle most of us to be asked to consider whether it has not accompanying evils to which we have been resolutely blind, and whether we do not pay a price for it of which we have never dreamed; and it sounds like disloyal heresy and lese-patriotism to suggest a doubt whether it is really so great a good after all, and a suspicion that it may be fast growing into a mischief. Yet something very like this is becoming the dim sentiment of numbers, and the half-confessed belief of a few; and both the vague thought and the definite conviction can find much justification in a close observation of our political progress and position. That we shall ever abandon our cherished system of government by party and legislation by a popular assembly, it is of course idle to fancy, and would be a grave error probably to desire; but it is something to take an impartial and searching view of its real working, and perhaps when once the country has fairly realised its mischiefs and its dangers, it may not be indisposed to listen to suggestions designed to mitigate the one and to avert the other. Therefore let us sit down for a few moments and count the cost.

What Parliament was to us in the days of our forefathers, what

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