like a baseless vision. Man is _sui generis_, sole and exclusive in
organization, without pre-existing type or affinity to other species;
and his alleged recent metamorphosis from a monkey, and his first and
far more distant one from a snail or a tadpole, are paradoxes only
worthy of idle debating clubs.

Having attempted to unfold the progression of species by his law of
development, the author next essays to explain the commencement of the
vital principle itself. But here, too, he must have a beginning, and his
"organic globule" answers a similar purpose, in deducing the mystery of
life, as his nuclei in the "nebular hypothesis." In both the perplexity
and real difficulty is not solved or mastered, but evaded. But we have
already remarked on the point, and shall only observe that when the
author can elicit _thought_ from inorganic matter, either by chemistry
or galvanism, we shall think he has made a step in creation. Until then
he does not advance, only deceives himself and readers by verbal
subtleties and baseless suppositions.

Apart from its hypotheses, the _Vestiges_ form a valuable and
interesting work. It is the most complete, elaborate, and--with all its
faults of detail, logic, and inference--the most scientific expositor of
universal nature yet offered to the world. But its hypotheses are
unwarranted, not inductively derived, and can have no hold on men of
science, supported as they mostly are by fanciful analogies, facts
misunderstood or misstated, and illustrations selected without
discrimination or applicability. Theories do sometimes conduce to the
discovery of truth, but are often obstructive; occupy the mind, like
theological controversy, without advancing science; and are viewed with
the same aversion by the philosopher that the political abstractions
tendered to the multitude by the demagogue are viewed by the patriotic