Lastly, the reviewer of the _Vestiges_ in _Blackwood's Magazine_, who is
understood to be a naturalist of distinguished ability, expresses
himself in an equally decided manner:--

"To reduce to a system the acts of creation, or the development of
the several forms of animal life, no more impeaches the authorship
of creation, than to trace the laws by which the world is upheld,
and its phenomena perpetually renewed. The presumption naturally
rises in the mind, that the same Great Being would adopt the same
mode of action in both cases.... To a mind accustomed, as is every
educated mind, to regard the operations of Deity as essentially
differing from the limited, sudden, evanescent impulses of a human
agent, it is distressing to be compelled to picture to itself, the
power of God as put forth _in any other manner than in those slow,
mysterious, universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to
work in;_ it pains the imagination to be obliged to assimilate
those operations, for a moment, to the brief energy of a human
will, or the manipulations of a human hand.... No, there is nothing
atheistic, nothing irreligious, in the attempt to conceive
creation, as well as reproduction, carried on by universal laws."

We have dwelt so much upon this matter because it is one in which
popular feelings are likely to be most deeply interested. We shall give
the author, too, the benefit of his _Explanations_ on another point,
elucidating his former statement of the transmutation of a crop of oats
into a crop of rye:--

"'At the request,' says Dr. Lindley, 'of the Marquis of Bristol,
the Reverend Lord Arthur Hervey, in the year 1843, sowed a handful