series from a lower to a higher type." After all, then, the family connection cannot be traced, and no one has a right to look into a man's face and say he sees the relationship in the likeness and expression. The man should smile if he did so, and ask him if he ever saw an ape smile? In fact, if an ape may be said to have a face, it is of too serious a turn to be capable of expressing a thought, and a simial smile is an impossible accomplishment, because it implies a sense either. of human folly or of human sentiment, of which apenature betrays no sign. If it plays it never laughs; though it might well grin if it could fancy itself compared to such a poor prying creature as a man claiming to be descended from the apes.

The desires of a creature are, as a rule, coincident with its power of gratifying them; and whatever mode of life a creature is adapted to enjoy is naturally that in which it is placed at its birth. The whole world is planned as if to accommodate the greatest possible variety of animal life, and enjoyment is the normal state of every sentient being. Now, if there are forests of trees in the world bearing hard fruit fit for food to such creatures as may be gifted with rude hands and band-like feet to climb the trees, and with strong teeth and jaws to crush that hard, nutty fruit, then we should expect to find such creatures in such forests to enjoy them. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangs are precisely formed for their habitat and habits. But we see not

* Address as President of the Geological Society, Feb. 17, 1860.

how they could be so without, as vertebrate animals, bearing a rather close anatomical resemblance to man, who also has the power of climbing and clutching, though with difficulty. The apes enjoy their life in their place, and death is a nonentity to them, as to every living creature but man, the dignity of whose nature is evinced by the power of fearing death as an idea, and yet of viewing it as but a step to a higher status. Our dignity is not diminished, nor our logic dimmed, by acknowledging our physical adaptation to a physical world, though indeed, by so doing, we claim for our bodies an outside likeness to certain other vertebrates. We, however, claim all this world and a world beyond as our habitat, and with hands that answer to our reason, and holding all geometry in their grasp, we fashion instruments with which to rule the elements, and penetrate with reasonable insight into the far heavens. Bones and muscles are not man. We are souls deriving ideas from sympathy with sages that lived before us thousands of years gone by rather than from our mere senses. We are persons, and neither things nor mere animals. And when we ask why our bodily limbs are somewhat like an ape's, we safely say because we want them for purposes proper to limbs; but the skeleton does not include our character, for we feel ourselves in some degree aspiring to know more of the Person who made us persons. And how can Huxley or Darwin assert that man might be a ramification of the same primitive stock as apes, if these can never be taught to think and act as personal beings? And

how can we suppose that the first man, while worshipping his Creator, accounted for his own existence and his position on either the hypothesis of Oken or of Darwin?

a child of the warm and

Man,' says Oken, 'is shallow parts of the sea.' This is dogma No. 1. He then adds in the next sentence a qualifying doubt, 'Possibly on one spot, and that the highest mountain of India.' Was the warm and shallow part of the sea there? Possibly,' he continues, only one favourable moment was granted in which men could arise.''They were littoral inhabitants, and without doubt [dogma No. 2] carniverous, as savages still are.' Whence could they have obtained fruits, cabbage, and turnips? The first men, then, were savages, according to dogma No. 2. But amidst the possibilities, possibly the Creator of man did not need the help of warm water to make a man; and possibly he could provide for him without making him a carniverous savage. Oken wanted the warm shallow sea, because he wanted some unknown sea-mucus as the human germ. He proceeds with his dogmata thus: As the human body has been formed by the extreme separation of the mucous mass, so must the human mind be a separation, a memberment of infusorial sensation.'* These words are intended to convey their own meaning, but what that meaning is the reader must discover for himself. But their meaning in relation to man is as plain as that of the words

* Oken's Physio-Philosophy, Ray Soc. Trans.

employed by Oken to define science, and, scientifically (may we say, impiously?), God Himself. This philosopher tells us that there is no other science than that which treats of nothing.' 'Mathematics is based upon nothing, and arises out of nothing' (as we see in his work). Then The Eternal is the nothing of of nature.' 'Man is God wholly manifested,' and yet 'God manifesting is an infinite sphere,' and the world is God rotating.' Truly Oken's theory of existence is, like his own mathematics, based upon nothing,' and may be summed up in Horace Smith's imitation of Byron,

And nought is everything, and everything is nought.

When we accept Oken's hypothesis, or any other concerning sea-mucus and germinal vesicles as the origin of man, we have a certain difficulty to overcome not altogether dependent on climate. We may suppose the primordial mucus or the stray vesicle, brought by whatever water-power we please, and deposited in an appropriate spot, say among the Himalayas, which name, by-the-bye, means the snowy region, and therefore, perhaps, not the most suitable for the incubation of an unborn life. But somewhere let there be the said mucus, turning into man by virtue of sunbeams and slush, the difficulty is this: How came it that another mass of sea-mucus happened to be thereabout just at that time, which mucus turned into a woman as a match for the man? Our philosophical instructor obligingly leaves us to the mercy of our imagination

to account for that singular coincidence in the movements of mucus, only suggesting that if we could ask the first man and woman, as thus originated, where they came from and how they came to be what they are, the only answer we should get from either of them would be that of Topsy-'I 'spects I growed.' A very respectable reply from a being sprung only from mucus. Mr. Darwin's faith is modified differently; he says, 'I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.'* This is pure and simple faith with which reason has nothing to do, and is not sustained by an approach to a single fact. But he advances to reason immediately after, and kindly adds: I should infer from analogy, that probably all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from some primordial form, into which life was breathed by the Creator.' Mr. Darwin says, somewhat exultingly : 'There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or one.' There is, doubtless, necessarily a grandeur in any conception of creative Power calling forth the wondrous world we live in, but the grandeur is not lessened by conceiving that Power as making every living thing according to its kind with the might of a single fiat. Mr. Darwin states the analogy: Their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and

* Origin of Species, 2d edit., p. 484.

† Ibid., p. 484.