rtainly been made in some way or
other, he sees reason to hope that not less important ameliorations may
in time succeed. If our improved chemistry (says he,) should ever
discover the art of making sugar from fossile or aerial matter, without
the assistance of vegetation, food for animals would then become as
plentiful as water, and they might live upon the earth without preying
on each other, as thick as blades of grass, without restraint to their
numbers but the want of local room: no very comfortable prospect, it
must be owned, especially to those who are aware of the alarming ratio
in which, according to later discoveries, population is found to
multiply itself; a consummation that would scarcely produce that at
which he thought it the chief duty of a philosopher to aim: namely, the
greatest possible quantity of human happiness. On being made acquainted
with reveries such as these, through the means of the press, we are
inclined to doubt the justice of his encomium on the art of printing,
since which discovery, he tells us, superstition has been much lessened
by the reformation of religion; and necromancy, astrology, chiromancy,
witchcraft, and vampyrism, have vanished from all classes of society;
though some are still so weak in the present enlightened times as to
believe in the prodigies of animal magnetism, and of metallic tractors.
What then is to be said of the prodigies of spontaneous vitality? To a
system which removes the Author of all so far from our contemplation, we
might well prefer the faith of

--the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.

The father of English poetry, who well knew what qualities and habits
might with most probability be assigned to men of different professions,
has made it a trait in the character of his Doctour of Phisike, that

His study was but little in the Bible.

Though there are illustrious examples of the contrary, yet it may
sometimes be with the physician as Shakspeare said of himself, when
complaining of the influence which the business of a player had on his
mind, that

--his nature is subdued
To that it works in.

A propensity to materialism had not, however, so subdued the mind of
Darwin, as to prevent him from acknowledging the existence of what he
terms the Great Cause of Causes, Parent of Parents, Ens Entium. Nay, he
went the length of maintaining, that his doctrine of spontaneous
vitality was not i