look it in the face. But then comes the old
question, " What is Truth?" Mr. Darwin
believes he knows, or is on the way to know.

Charles Darwin comes of a family renowned
for close observation, intellectual ability, and
boldness of speculation; he is gifted with clear
and passionless judgment, and with an amiable
and gentlemanly disposition; it is doubtful
whether he have an enemy in the world; it
is certain that he has, and deserves to have,
many friends. He is blessed with a sufficiency
of worldly riches, and has not strong health—
the very combination to make a student. He is
sincerity itself, thoroughly believing all he states,
and daring to state what he believes. No mental
reservation is employed to dissemble the
tendency of his scientific views. He has
circumnavigated the globe, and beheld the manners of
many men, savage and civilised; of many birds,
beasts, reptiles, and fishes. He has compared
living forms with those which existed on the
same spot of land ages and ages ago. In his
Voyage with the Beagle he has delighted his
readers with the simplicity and the clearness
with which he has explained geological changes.
For more than twenty years he has been
patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts
of facts which could possibly have any bearing
on the origin of living things as we now behold
them existing; regardless of expense and
labour, he has long searched for the truth respecting
this question. He believes he has found it,
and he enunciates his creed in a book which is
an abstract of a larger work that will take two
or three more years to complete.

But, as the tolerant spirit of the age allows
him to state and to hold his belief unmolested,
it also allows dissenters from his novel doctrines
to declare their unbelief of them, and to manifest
the hardness of their hearts by utter deafness to
Mr. Darwin's most persuasive attempts at
conversion. The world in general is quite
unprepared to hear his unaccustomed views
propounded. The propositions are so unfamiliar,
that, be they false or be they true, they are
almost sure to meet with a flat denial. The
dominant and fundamental idea may be grand,
clear, and decided. As a theory, it is complete
and harmonious in all its parts, regarded merely
as a theory; but, as a history of the past,
and as a statement of present and future facts,
its authority must entirely rest on the reader's
judgment whether the proofs and the reasoning
are conclusive to his mind or not. It is a question
of the interpretation to be given to certain
appearances and occurrences; it is a matter of
circumstantial evidence. Mr. Darwin is already
supported by a small party of disciples and
fellow-labourers, who put faith in his inspiration;
while the great majority shrink back in alarm at
the boldness of his conclusions, and at the
illimitable lapse of time which it unfolds before
their wondering and bewildered gaze. He will
hardly be surprised himself—nor will the reader
—to find that the mass of his audience have
ears but hear not, and eyes but see not—as he
sees and understands the works of nature.
Before accepting such a theory, we, the multitude,
must think twice. Well, let us think twice;
thinking twice never does harm.

The creed to which it is proposed to convert
the world is as follows: Although much remains
obscure, and will long remain obscure, Mr. Darwin
entertains no doubt that the view which most
naturalists entertain, and which he formerly
entertained himself—namely, that each species has
been independently created—is erroneous. He
is fully convinced that species are not immutable;*
but that those belonging to what are
called the same genera are lineal descendants of
some other and generally extinct species.

* See " Species," in All the Year Round, No. 58,
p. 174.

The modifications which species have undergone
are mainly, but not exclusively, he believes,
the result of a process called Natural Selection.
He cannot doubt that the theory of descent,
with modification, embraces all the members of
the same class. He believes that animals have
descended from at most only four or five
progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser
number. Analogy would lead him one step
further; namely, to the belief that, in the
beginning, there arose some single, primitive,
rudimentary, organised cell, or elementary being,
which was the first parent of every living creature
—that all animals and plants have descended
from some one prototype. But analogy, he
owns, 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. We see this even in so
trifling a circumstance as that the same poison
often similarly affects plants and animals; or
that the poison secreted by the gall-fly
produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or
oak-tree. Therefore, Mr. Darwin would infer
from analogy that, probably, all the organic
beings which have ever lived on this earth have
descended from some one primordial form, into
which life was first breathed by the Creator.

Is it too much to say that, in the good old
times, opinions like these would have been
strongly redolent of fagot and flame?

Our philosophical reformer adduces numerous
facts which he holds to be inexplicable on the
theory of independent acts of creation. By the
supposition of a migration, with subsequent
modification, we can see why oceanic islands
should be inhabited by few species, but, of these,
that many should be peculiar. We can clearly
see why those animals which cannot cross wide
spaces of ocean, as frogs and terrestrial
mammals, should not inhabit oceanic islands; and
why, on the other hand, new and peculiar
species of bats, which can traverse the ocean,
should so often be found on islands far distant
from any continent. The grand facts respecting
the grouping of all organic beings on certain
areas of the earth's surface—such as a
predominance of monkeys with prehensile tails in one
country, of ant-eaters and toothless animals in