gin in particular, is built up. It is known that there is no transition form between the Invertebrata and the Vertebrata; but as a recognized hiatus between any two classes would be fatal to the "unbroken sequence of nature" in which the Evolutionist delights, it must be filled up or "bridged over," coûte que coûte; and the Ascidian has been selected to represent the transition form. Now, this Ascidian is not even a highly-developed mollusc, but a creature of low organization, about on a level with an oyster, fixed to the rock during the whole of its adult life, and having no nervous system to speak of, with the exception of one ganglion and a few nervous fibres between the two layers of its bag-like body. In this adult form it evidently will not answer the required conditions, but it is said to have been discovered that its larvæ "are related to the Vertebrata in their manner of development, in the relative position of the nervous system, and in possessing a structure closely like the chorda dorsalis of vertebrate animals." And thus we are supposed to "have at last gained a clue to the source whence the Vertebrata have been derived."

I would ask for especial attention to this point; for it is here demonstrable either that the zeal for theory has led Mr. Darwin and his school into grievous and palpable error, or that there is no truth in the doctrines of embryology as set forth by all systematic writers. If the relations between Ontogenesis and Phylogenesis as above stated have any existence in nature, no embryonic form of any animal can possibly represent any higher type of development than the animal itself. For instance the larvæ of M might exist as L, F, or D, but never as P or S. Yet we are here called upon to believe that the larva of a mollusc appears, not in the form of a lower mollusc, or one of the Calenterata, but that it is actually organized, living, and moving in the form of an adult being of a different sub-kingdom, the highest of all, the Vertebrata. I am not in a position to dispute the fact, if such it be. I have neither seen any dissection of the larva in question, nor heard of any. All that I would urge is this, that such a fact will

* Descent of Man, p. 205.

utterly destroy the entire theory and science of embryology. If there be any truth whatever in this science, it is perfectly clear that the existence of a quasivertebrate larva in the Ascidians is a very cogent argument that the Ascidians have descended from some vertebrate type, but certainly not that the Vertebrata have descended from Ascidians.

Professor Haeckel has apparently perceived this difficulty, as a matter of theory, and provides for it in the most characteristic manner, by inserting in our genealogical tree a form of animals which he calls Chordonia, which "developed themselves from the Annelida, by the formation of a spinal marrow and a chorda dorsalis!"* Other details of their structure are given very systematically, and it is shown how they became the parents of the nearest now-living genera, the Ascidians, &c. The author does not even profess to have any evidence to produce that such animals ever existed; there is no living representative of them; there is no fossil evidence of their early existence; the sole raison d'être of the class is, that they are required by the hypothesis. This interpolation of imaginary classes of animals occurs frequently in Professor Haeckel's history of man, as we shall see presently. Meanwhile, should it be supposed that I have exaggerated this most marvellous method of constructing scientific natural history, I would commend to the reader's careful attention Professor Haeckel's twenty-second chapter, on the "Brute Ancestors of Man," in.the work already quoted.

Thus our study of the pedigree of man, as set forth by Mr. Darwin, lands us in a serious dilemma. Either the pedigree is hopelessly shattered at the most important point in its development, by collision with embryology; or this doctrine, that upon which Evolution is mainly supported, is proved to be a delusion, inasmuch as it cannot by any possibility be strained to include Mr. Darwin's facts. The antagonism is real and irreconcilable; it must be left to the transcendental philosophers of the school of Evolution to decide which part it will be the most to the advantage of their doctrine that they should uphold.

* Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 583.

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orang, gibbon, gorilla, and chimpanzee, amongst which, however, we are not to look for the direct ancestors of man, but amongst the unknown extinct apes of the Miocene." 21. The Pithecanthropi, or dumb-ape men-an unknown race-the nearest modern representatives of which are cretins and idiots!! (p. 592). They must have lived, as a necessary transition to-22. The Homines, or true men, who developed themselves from the last class, by the gradual conversion of brute howlings into articulate speech," &c., &c.

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With regard to the immediate ape-like ancestors of man, it is distinctly and very emphatically set forth (p. 577) that none of the modern anthropoid apes can be regarded as our direct progenitors :

"This opinion is never held by thoughtful supporters of the descent-theory, although often attributed to them by their thoughtless opponents. Our ape-like ancestors are long since extinct. Perchance their fossil remains may some time be found in the tertiary deposits of Southern Asia or Africa. They must neverthless be ranked amongst the tailless catarhine anthropoid apes."

It is perhaps scarcely necessary again to state that such a scheme of progression as that just briefly sketched has no existence in nature. There is no evidence of it in existing forms of life; there is no indication of it in fossil remains; and there is no possibility of such a progression, even as a matter of theory, in accordance with the recognised laws of morphology. There are at least four distinct types of animal life, the Calenterata, the Mollusca, the Annulosa, and the Vertebrata, between no two of which is there any transition form or forms, either known or conceivable—that is, if morphology be a science at all, or anything beyond an incoherent aggregation of irrelevant and unconnected details of

structure.

The reader is now in position to judge of the value of the evidence, which I have endeavored fairly to epitomize, both as to evolution in general and the pedigree of man in particular; and aiso to determine whether it is necessary to do more than to leave both the original and the derived doctrine to perish from inherent weakness. The connection of these doctrines with human automatism is nothing new or strange. All that has

served is essentially physical. . . . All move'Every fact or phenomenon that can be obment or change, every acting force, and every effect whatever, are due necessarily to mechanical causes, governed by laws. . . Every fact or phenomenon observed in a living body is at once a physical phenomenon and a product of organization." (Preface, pp. II et seq.)

He further refers to these physical phenomena as "constituting life" (p. 12), and to sensation and thought being due to changes in a "particular system of organs capable of giving rise to these physical, mechanical, and organic phenomena." From these general principles the conclusions are natural and inevitable, that "all living bodies or organisms are subject to the same natural laws as are lifeless or inorganic bodies; that the ideas and faculties of the mind generally are but manifestations of movements in the central nervous system;" and finally, that "the Will is in truth never free."

But be the doctrine new or old, it cannot be denied that it is a strictly logical deduction from the postulate.

If man is but the product of the molecular forces of matter, from which he is evolved without the "intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes;" if he is merely a "co-ordinated term of Nature's great progression," or a result of "the interaction of organism and environment through cosmic ranges of time;" then is he indeed, hopelessly and helplessly, a mere automaton, with neither choice, will, nor responsibility. But if, on the other hand, it has been or can be proved that such doctrines find no support from science, from observation, from experiment, or from reason, then the doctrine of Human Automatism is relegated to the domain of all such

"figments of the imagination," and man may trust implicitly to the consciousness which tells him that he is no mere machine; but a responsible free agent,

with duties to perform to his God, his neighbor, and himself; and a conscience to prick him if he performs them not.-Contemporary Review.

It must have frequently occurred to the readers of modern poetry, that the ancient and time-worn dictum, assuring us that a poet is born, not made, must in our day have lost, if not some of its force, then certainly some of its fitness. To this conclusion we must come if the word poet has not changed its signification. The original genius ("his soul is with the saints we trust ") who first propounded the poeta nascitur dogma, had his eye no doubt upon certain of the stiffnecked and rebellious, who clung to the condemned creed, that, given a fair average quantity and quality of mental fibre, a poet might, after all, and with some little trouble, be made. Dr. Johnson held that a given amount of ability may be turned in any direction, as a man," he argued, "may walk this way or that." And so he can," answered in our day Archbishop Whately, "because walking is the action for which his legs are fitted; but though he may use his eyes for looking at this object or that, he cannot hear with his eyes, or see with his ears. And the eyes and ears are not more different than, for instance, the poetical faculty and the mathematical."

even

Notwithstanding the completeness of this answer, there is room for grave suspicion that the Doctor's theory has still, not only its believers, but its school and its disciples. If we are to judge by the living facts around us, and seek a conclusion through the philosophy that teaches by examples, that conclusion must inevitably be-either, that we have still amongst us crowds of heretics who abide by the belief in the manufactured article, or that the poetic faculty is a very much more common production than it used to be. Nor is the alternative very puzzling. Any one who takes the trouble of looking into the titles of the several claimants of the laurel as they rise, must get himself more and more convinced that the poet made is rampant, and that the real possessor

of what Mrs. Browning called "the sorrowful great gift,"-the poet born of the old dogma-is as rare as he has ever been, and in fact, there are not a few who do not hesitate to declare he is as dead as the Dodo.

Many of those in the present day who approach nearest to the old standard of the poet born have, in addition, so much about them of the poet made, that the proverb no longer fits, and, we may add, have so much about them of what is so elaborately made, that one is tempted to believe some of them might have been greater men at less pains.

Macaulay declared that "as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines." Without denying that the assertion at first sight has an appearance of plausibility, we are inclined, on closer examination, to set it down as one of those half-truths which the brilliant essayist's partiality for a telling antithesis frequently led him into: just one of those picturesque announcements, which Mr. Spedding-speaking of Macaulay's extravagant strictures on Lord Baconcharacterizes as proceeding from "the love of rhetorical effect in a mind rhetorically disposed." If indeed we are to suppose civilization in Macaulay's phrase to be in this case synonymous with education, as it is loosely understood, then the statement does contain a certain amount of truth. But if we mean by education what it should be rather than what it is a drawing out of a man's emotional nature, as well as his merely mental qualities, then the statement not only contains in it nothing that is true, but something that is pretty nearly pernicious. If even we could be brought to admit the possibility of poetical decline from such a cause, we would not the less strenuously deny the necessity of any such decline. Certainly nothing will contribute more surely to the decline of poetry than the civilization which forgets to educate those very faculties and parts of a man's nature

by the exercise of which alone poetry can either be produced or appreciated. And if, in addition to the neglect of these faculties, we give an exaggerated importance to the education of the faculties which naturally counteract them, we at length reach tangible grounds and get something more than a glimpse of the civilization in which poetry necessarily declines. Under like conditions, would it be a matter of surprise that Logic, Metaphysics, Science, or any of the mathematical or mechanical arts should also decline? Physiologists have long ago agreed that the inordinate exercise of one set of muscles invariably results in the impoverishment of the corresponding set, and it is quite as possible in the mind as in the body, by excessive exercise, to strengthen one set of faculties to the permanent weakness and injury of the others. Nor can it be denied that the prevailing partiality for scientific and mechanical pursuits, by keeping imagination out in the cold, has had the effect of making our more recent advances rather a one-legged progress.

By exclusive attention to the education of the emotional side of a man's nature, you will no doubt succeed in creating such a milksop as shall hardly supply fibre enough for the hero of a penny novel; but, on the other hand, by an equally exclusive cultivation of the rationalistic side, you will develop something quite as weak, and as dangerous, and a good deal more intolerable. To look strongly at anything with one. eye, it is natural to close the other, and so with reason's eye riveted, one need not be surprised to find the eye of imagination shut.

In the civilization whose progress is thoroughly sound, the education of the head and of the heart should go abreast, and the assumed advancement in which poetry declines is more than likely to be the civilization of an age that sacrifices its emotions to its reason. If this be true, we must be prepared to see a good many other things decline. First after poetry, perhaps religion, and after that the possibility of political cohesion. If we read history carefully enough, we shall find in most cases, that this lopsided civilization, under some very high-sounding aliases, "Perfectibility of Human Nature," "Age of Reason," and

so forth, has a trick of moving in a circle, and playing itself out. By-andby the neglected half of human nature has its revenge. The fatal flaw in this emotionless culture is that it contains no sort of human amalgam strong enough to bind society together. The individual forces composing it are what Lord Palmerston would have called "a fortuitous concourse of atoms," and possess no element of political adherence. The forgotten thing that under the name of Emotion was allowed to fail asleep as quiet as a lamb-the busy worshippers of Reason taking no note of the factawakens one day with a changed name and a changed nature. It is now a lion. Spurned Emotion has grown to Rage, an easy transition. Renewed by his sleep, the lion rises up and scowls around him, rushes into society with his tail in the air, inaugurates a Reign of Terror, and reasserts the sovereignty of the brute. When the mad fit has gone, and the long arrears to the heart have been paid for in blood, cash down, society sits down again clothed and in its right mind. The Sisyphus of civilization finds himself again at the foot of the hill, glad to accept a philosophy that, if less high-sounding and pretentious, is at least a good deal more human.

That in the progress of the civilization worth the name, the arts should, and actually do extend their influence and empire, hardly requires to be argued. It is rather a matter of historical demonstration than a matter of opinion, and the immensely wider field and increased appreciation of the particular art of poetry might be amply illustrated by simple reference to fact. We do not mean to assert, however, that the publication of any number of editions of the best poets, with an almost universally reading public, necessarily involves the more frequent recurrence in society of the poet born. The times and seasons of genius are as inscrutable as the thing itself. It is one of those things (for there are a few of them yet left) that has not as yet been altogether circumvented by the rationalist. The natural law-as he would probably call it-that evolves. its higher immortals, that drops down here and there, over three or four centuries, its Raphaels, Shakspeares, and Beethovens, is one of those that has not