one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of
intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by
way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, "Is it
credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are tending to
become men;" who is so ignorant of paleontology, that he can talk
of the "flowers and fruits" of the plants of the carboniferous
epoch; of comparative anatomy, that he can gravely affirm the
poison apparatus of the venomous snakes to be "entirely separate
from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to
themselves;" of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask,
"what advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles
into which the blood can be evaporated?" Nor does the reviewer
fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a
little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the
history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and
Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he
cannot "consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the word
of Revelation;" but, for all that, he devotes pages to the
exposition of his conviction that Mr. Darwin's theory
"contradicts the revealed relation of the creation to its
Creator," and is "inconsistent with the fulness of his glory."

If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the 'Origin of
Species' to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its
publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and
unmannerly as the 'Quarterly Review' article, unless, perhaps,
the address of a Reverend Professor to the Dublin Geological
Society might enter into competition with it. But a large
proportion of Mr. Darwin's critics had a lamentable resemblance
to the 'Quarterly' reviewer, in so far as they lacked either the