Now, all this is, we think, really charming writing.  We feel as we walk abroad with Mr. Darwin very much as the favoured object of the attention of the dervise must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his eye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, and diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, and rubies, which were sparkling unregarded beneath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes save those which the dervise had enlightened.  But here we are bound to say our pleasure terminates; for, when we turn with Mr. Darwin to his “argument,” we are almost immediately at variance with him.  It is as an “argument” that the essay is put forward; as an argument we will test it.

We can perhaps best convey to our readers a clear view of Mr. Darwin’s chain of reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them, first, the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them; next, the leading propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final inference; and then the mode by which he endeavours to support his propositions.

The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great Earth-Museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son,—­“animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number” (p. 484), as Mr. Darwin at first somewhat diffidently suggests; or rather, as, growing bolder when he has once pronounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to us, from one single head:—­

Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that ALL ANIMALS and PLANTS have descended from some one prototype.  But analogy may be a deceitful guide.  Nevertheless, all living things have much in common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction....

Therefore I shall infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the Creator.—­p. 484.

This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume.  Man, beast, creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants of some one individual ens, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us.  This is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to arrive at.  To find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms, and flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal descendants