been compelled, often sorely against its will, to recognize the
operation of secondary causes in events where ignorance beheld an
immediate intervention of a higher power? And when we know that living
things are formed of the same elements as the inorganic world, that they
act and react upon it, bound by a thousand ties of natural piety, is it
probable, nay is it possible, that they, and they alone, should have no
order in their seeming disorder, no unity in their seeming
multiplicity, should suffer no explanation by the discovery of some
central and sublime law of mutual connexion?

Questions of this kind have assuredly often arisen, but it might have
been long before they received such expression as would have commanded
the respect and attention of the scientific world, had it not been for
the publication of the work which prompted this article. Its author,
Mr. Darwin, inheritor of a once celebrated name, won his spurs in
science when most of those now distinguished were young men, and has
for the last 20 years held a place in the front ranks of British
philosophers. After a circumnavigatory voyage, undertaken solely for
the love of his science, Mr. Darwin published a series of researches
which at once arrested the attention of naturalists and geologists; his
generalizations have since received ample confirmation, and now command
universal assent, nor is it questionable that they have had the most
important influence on the progress of science. More recently Mr.
Darwin, with a versatility which is among the rarest of gifts, turned
his attention to a most difficult question of zoology and minute
anatomy; and no living naturalist and anatomist has published a better
monograph than that which resulted from his labours. Such a man, at
all events, has not entered the sanctuary with unwashed hands, and when
he lays before us the results of 20 years' investigation and reflection
we must listen even though we be disposed to strike. But, in reading