by physical means, he has not made a single step in generation.

This we consider the least satisfactory and successful portion of the
author's work. It assigns no intelligible cause for the origin of
life--it only _begs the question_, by the substitution of one mystery
for another. His law of DEVELOPMENT is of the same description,--without
sense or significancy, unsupported by applicable facts, and is not so
comprehensible a cause of vital changes as LAMARCK'S assigned
progressive tendencies of animals to master the appliances essential to
their wants.


ANIMAL AFFINITIES, INSTINCT, AND REASON.

The scheme of the _Vestiges_ is uniformly and consistently worked out;
all phenomena are resolved into gravitation and development--the first
as the law of inorganic, the latter of organic matter. By the last,
however, no new principle is revealed, only a new phrase devised, by the
amplified application of which the author's entire system may be said to
be _begged_ rather than proved; since development is used in a sense
implying an indefinite power of animate and inanimate creation; so that
at last we make no new discovery, only grasp a new nomenclature.

But the author is always interesting, either by the novel display of
facts or the ingenious concatenation of plausibilities. Consistently
with his fundamental notion of animal transmutation, he tries to prove a
family likeness or affinity from the humblest to the highest species. In
this way he seeks to explain the marvel with respect to the huge bulk of
many of the tertiary mammalia--the mammoth, mastadon, and megatherium;
they were in immediate descent from the cetacea, or whale and dolphin