When the author deals with the facts of science he interests and
instructs, but when he speculates he only amuses or perplexes, without
advancing knowledge. His terse and luminous description of the astral
firmament deeply impresses with the might and the magnitude of the vast
design; but when he attempts to account for the elimination of suns and
worlds, their formation and arrangement, we are struck by the puerile
folly of his conjectural presumptions.

Descending from this august and glittering canopy to our own planet, we
are not less astonished by the exhibition of the extraordinary
revolutions it has undergone. Geology is the true historian of the
earth. Conducted by the lights it affords, we see an eternity of ages
has rolled before us; we discover a series of worlds rising through the
depths of ocean from the central sphere of heat, amidst boiling floods
and volcanic fires, each new platform of existence, that countless
periods of time had been requisite to form, peopled with its own
congenial forms of organic life, mostly commencing with the simpler, and
ascending by almost imperceptible gradations to the higher and more
complex structures of being. We are struck by the correspondence, by the
_pari passu_ development and formation of the earth's crust and organic
existences, and we are apt hastily to conclude that a relation has
subsisted between them, that contemporary changes have been cause and
effect, and that the improvement of the earth produced the correlative
improvement in animals and plants.

This forms the author's second questionable hypothesis; it is plausible,
but false--repugnant to fact and correct observation. We have no
credible evidence that species have changed, or are changeable by the
utmost efforts of art or favouring conditions; all we can effect is to
improve them within definite limits, but not alter their characteristic