The other solvent which Mr. Darwin most freely and, we think, unphilosophically employs to get rid of difficulties, is his use of time.  This he shortens or prolongs at will by the mere wave of his magician’s rod.  Thus the duration of whole epochs, during which certain forms of animal life prevailed, is gathered up into a point, whilst an unlimited expanse of years, “impressing his mind with a sense of eternity,” is suddenly interposed between that and the next series, though geology proclaims the transition to have been one of gentle and, it may be, swift accomplishment.  All this too is made the more startling because it is used to meet the objections drawn from facts.  “We see none of your works,” says the observer of nature; “we see no beginnings of the portentous change; we see plainly beings of another order in creation, but we find amongst them no tendencies to these altered organisms.”  “True,” says the great magician, with a calmness no difficulty derived from the obstinacy of facts can disturb; “true, but remember the effect of time.  Throw in a few hundreds of millions of years more or less, and why should not all these changes be possible, and, if possible, why may I not assume them to be real?”

Together with this large licence of assumption we notice in this book several instances of receiving as facts whatever seems to bear out the theory upon the slightest evidence, and rejecting summarily others, merely because they are fatal to it.  We grieve to charge upon Mr. Darwin this freedom in handling facts, but truth extorts it from us.  That the loose statements and unfounded speculations of this book should come from the author of the monograms on Cirripedes, and the writer, in the natural history of the Voyage of the “Beagle,” of the paper on the Coral Reefs, is indeed a sad warning how far the love of a theory may seduce even a first-rate naturalist from the very articles of his creed.

This treatment of facts is followed up by another favourite line of argument, namely, that by this hypothesis difficulties otherwise inextricable are solved.  Such passages abound.  Take a few, selected almost at random, to illustrate what we mean:—­

  How inexplicable are these facts on the ordinary view of creation!—­p.
  436.

  Such facts as the presence of peculiar species of bats and the absence
  of other mammals on oceanic islands are utterly inexplicable on the
  theory of independent acts of creation.—­pp. 477-8.

  It must be admitted that these facts receive no explanation on the
  theory of creation.—­p. 478.

The inhabitants of the Cape de Verde Islands are related to those of Africa, like those of the Galapagos to America.  I believe this grand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation.—­pp. 398-9.

Now what can be more simply reconcilable with that theory than Mr. Darwin’s own account of the mode in which the migration of animal life from one distant region to another is continually accomplished?