includes not only all we can learn from the revelations of time, but from those of eternity also; that is to say, if man be immortal, which he must be, or his desires are beyond his destiny and he is only an incongruous being, created with the promise of a purpose never to be fulfilled.

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CHAPTER III.

THE HYPOTHETICAL GENESIS OF MAN.

HAVING considered the bearing of man's bodily likeness and unlikeness to apes and other animals, let us now proceed to enquire how far the theories of life, either new or old, will assist us to form a conception of the origin and standing-place of the first man.

Though looking with reverence and awe at the lowest creatures, and, in a sense, feeling ready to say with Job-Thou O worm art my mother;' and truly, moreover, being linked to the relationship by much of conformation, and by necessities in common; with the consciousness, too, that the touch of Omnipotence is ever evident alike in the flesh and life of maggots and of men-one may yet find it not the less unpleasant to be told we are derived in a direct line even from apes. Indeed, if we may believe those who pretend to have seen traces of genealogy so far back, it appears that if our real origin be sought, we-identity being involved in the continuity-we ourselves can be no other than mere developments of reptilian or some earlier spawn, and might have become toads or other slimy coldblooded creatures, but for circumstances that diverted

our tendencies in that line, and produced a greater enormity of deviation from the pristine type of creepers and crawlers by wriggling us into being as men and women. We must not complain, however, that our reason is offended at such information lest our reason itself should be suspected; but really we require a good amount of some sort of philosophy not to laugh when told that a duck, for instance, was not expressly intended to be a duck with a web-foot, that it might pleasantly move on the water, but that its forefathers and mothers a long way back began under pressing circumstances to get a duckish disposition, and by dint of endeavour for ages to try their chance of paddling themselves about on the pools of a puddly world their efforts were at length quite rewarded and resulted in a complete success-so remarkable, indeed, at last, that a generation sprang from them thoroughly equipped for the waters with web-feet, oily backs, boat-shaped bodies, spoony bills, and bowels to correspond with mudworms and duckweed.

Thus, also, it is said that polar bears of peculiar make pawed about in the arctic seas, catching shrimps and jelly-fish, until their coarse hairy coats turned into a kind of seal-skin, and their whole economy at length was reduced to, or produced in, the form of a kind of walrus, and then a whale, so that train-oil and blubber are but developments of bear's grease. There was nothing abrupt or startling in those changes, they were so very, very slow; which of course arose from the struggle to determine amongst the existing tendencies

whether it were better to go on as before, or to take a new turn. But habits, however chronic, in the matter of originating species by selection, are never confirmed by duration, but may be changed for new ones on special occasions, and under the force of urgent circumstances, if time enough be provided and there be nothing to signify in the way. The change, however, must be slow, whatever the urgency. Do we not see, in short, such a gradation in the scale of living existences, special neighbours being so nearly alike that to distinguish which from which would puzzle even an anatomical Solomon? And therefore it is no wonder if they do not know themselves and run into each other from this end of the system to that-if there be any system—till a place in nature for one creature more than another is nowhere, and the whole world is all variation from this to that, and back again.

Every kind of living creature was evolved, if not hatched, from one kind of egg; or rather there are no kinds of creatures and no kinds of eggs: only this became that, or that this, as it might be, in consequence of the innate tendency' of this and that to vary its mood and mode of life. How anything happened to be endowed with an 'innate tendency' to become something else does not appear; and how nature should have a course without a fixed channel to run in, the variational theory wots not. It is the child's question in the mouth of the philosopher--which was first, the egg or the hen? as if there were any eggs but from creatures to produce them. But things are not

unreasonable because ignorant people think so; and therefore, peradventure, if we had but an innate tendency' to increase our knowledge of facts, we should perceive the beauty and truth of the theory that deduces all forms of life from one original germ. We only beg the propounders of this notion, which they call a theory, to supply us with the required facts, since we have been taught that theories are always supposed to be founded on facts, and can have no foundation if, as in this case, the facts at present exist only in fancy. Let us see an instance of a tendency to variation producing a new species, and let us look at a germ that had not a parent, ere we believe.

Oken declares his belief that neither man nor any other animal was created, but merely developed from an organic point or vesicle, infusorial or otherwise, and so microscopic that he does not profess to have seen it nor its immediate product.*

Lamarck, in like manner, contends that all living things sprang from a solitary homogeneous jelly that got alive by the forces of involuntary agencies, and took to organising themselves with an 'innate tendency' to perfection-the perfection of what not being stated. The upshot of Lamarck's hypothesis is clearly expressed by Lyell: It is not the organs or, in other words, the nature and form of the parts of the body of an animal which have given rise to its habits and particular faculties, but, on the contrary, its habits, its manner of

* Oken's Physio-Philosophy, Ray Soc. Trans., sect. 920-960.