Each species or sort of chair, as we have said, has its varieties, and one species shades off by gradations into another.  And—­note it well—­these numerous and successively slight variations and gradations, far from suggesting an accidental origin to chairs and to their forms, are very proofs of design.

Again, edifice is a generic category of thought.  Egyptian, Grecian, Byzantine, and Gothic buildings are well-marked species, of which each individual building of the sort is a material embodiment.  Now, the question is, whether these categories or ideas may not have been evolved, one from another in succession, or from some primal, less specialized, edificial category.  What better evidence for such hypothesis could we have than the variations and grades which connect these species with each other?  We might extend the parallel, and get some good illustrations of natural selection from the history of architecture, and the origin of the different styles under different climates and conditions.  Two considerations may qualify or limit the comparison.  One, that houses do not propagate, so as to produce continuing lines of each sort and variety; but this is of small moment on Agassiz’s view, he holding that genealogical connection is not of the essence of a species at all.  The other, that the formation and development of the ideas upon which human works proceed are gradual; or, as the same great naturalist well states it, “while human thought is consecutive, Divine thought is simultaneous.”  But we have no right to affirm this of Divine action.

We must close here.  We meant to review some of the more general scientific objections which we thought not altogether tenable.  But, after all, we are not so anxious just now to know whether the new theory is well founded on facts, as whether it would be harmless if it were.  Besides, we feel quite unable to answer some of these objections, and it is pleasanter to take up those which one thinks he can.

Among the unanswerable, perhaps the weightiest of the objections, is that of the absence, in geological deposits, of vestiges of the intermediate forms which the theory requires to have existed.  Here all that Mr. Darwin can do is to insist upon the extreme imperfection of the geological record and the uncertainty of negative evidence.  But, withal, he allows the force of the objection almost as much as his opponents urge it—­so much so, indeed, that two of his English critics turn the concession unfairly upon him, and charge him with actually basing his hypothesis upon these and similar difficulties—­as if he held it because of the difficulties, and not in spite of them; a handsome return for his candor!