The value of such objections to the theory of derivation may be tested by one or two analogous cases.  The common scientific as well as popular belief is that of the original, independent creation of oxygen and hydrogen, iron, gold, and the like.  Is the speculative opinion now increasingly held, that some or all of the supposed elementary bodies are derivative or compound, developed from some preceding forms of matter, irreligious?  Were the old alchemists atheists as well as dreamers in their attempts to transmute earth into gold?  Or, to take an instance from force (power)—­which stands one step nearer to efficient cause than form—­was the attempt to prove that heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and even mechanical power, are variations or transmutations of one force, atheistical in its tendency?  The supposed establishment of this view is reckoned as one of the greatest scientific triumphs of this century.

Perhaps, however, the objection is brought, not so much against the speculation itself, as against the attempt to show how derivation might have been brought about.  Then the same objection applies to a recent ingenious hypothesis made to account for the genesis of the chemical elements out of the ethereal medium, and to explain their several atomic weights and some other characteristics by their successive complexity—­hydrogen consisting of so many atoms of ethereal substance united in a particular order, and so on.  The speculation interested the philosophers of the British Association, and was thought innocent, but unsupported by facts.  Surely Mr. Darwin’s theory is none the worse, morally, for having some foundation in fact.

In our opinion, then, it is far easier to vindicate a theistic character for the derivative theory, than to establish the theory itself upon adequate scientific evidence.  Perhaps scarcely any philosophical objection can be urged against the former to which the nebular hypothesis is not equally exposed.  Yet the nebular hypothesis finds general scientific acceptance, and is adopted as the basis of an extended and recondite illustration in Mr. Agassiz’s great work.[I-13]

How the author of this book harmonizes his scientific theory with his philosophy and theology, he has not informed us.  Paley in his celebrated analogy with the watch, insists that if the timepiece were so constructed as to produce other similar watches, after a manner of generation in animals, the argument from design would be all the stronger.  What is to hinder Mr. Darwin from giving Paley’s argument a further a-fortiori extension to the supposed case of a watch which sometimes produces better watches, and contrivances adapted to successive conditions, and so at length turns out a chronometer, a town clock, or a series of organisms of the same type?  From certain incidental expressions at the close of the volume, taken in connection with the motto adopted from Whewell, we judge it probable that our author