contemporaries, and, above all, to the requirements of scientific logic. We
have ventured to point out that it does not, as yet, satisfy all those
requirements; but we do not hesitate to assert that it is as superior to
any preceding or contemporary hypothesis, in the extent of observational
and experimental basis on which it rests, in its rigorously scientific
method, and in its power of explaining biological phenomena, as was the
hypothesis of Copernicus to the speculations of Ptolemy. But the planetary
orbits turned out to be not quite circular after all, and, grand as was the
service Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler and Newton had to come after
him. What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What
if species should offer residual phaenomena, here and there, not explicable
by natural selection? Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a position
to say whether this is, or is not, the case; but in either event they will
owe the author of "The Origin of Species" an immense debt of gratitude. We
should leave a very wrong impression on the reader's mind if we permitted
him to suppose that the value of that work depends wholly on the ultimate
justification of the theoretical views which it contains. On the contrary,
if they were disproved to-morrow, the book would still be the best of its
kind--the most compendious statement of well-sifted facts bearing on the
doctrine of species that has ever appeared. The chapters on Variation, on
the Struggle for Existence, on Instinct, on Hybridism, on the Imperfection
of the Geological Record, on Geographical Distribution, have not only no
equals, but, so far as our knowledge goes, no competitors, within the range
of biological literature. And viewed as a whole, we do not believe that,
since the publication of Von Baer's "Researches on Development," thirty
years ago, any work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence,
not only on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of
Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly
penetrated.