nded to supply the facts which are to support the completed
argument of the present essay. In this we have a specimen-collection of
the vast accumulation; and, working from these as the high analytical
mathematician may work from the admitted results of his conic sections,
he proceeds to deduce all the conclusions to which he wishes to conduct
his readers.

The essay is full of Mr. Darwin's characteristic excellences. It is a
most readable book; full of facts in natural history, old and new, of
his collecting and of his observing; and all of these are told in his
own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations,
and all sparkle with the colours of fancy and the lights of imagination.
It assumes, too, the grave proportions of a sustained argument upon a
matter of the deepest interest, not to naturalists only, or even to men
of science exclusively, but to every one who is interested in the
history of man and of the relations of nature around him to the history
and plan of creation.

With Mr. Darwin's "argument" we may say in the outset that we shall have
much and grave fault to find. But this does not make us the less
disposed to admire the singular excellences of his work; and we will
seek _in limine_ to give our readers a few examples of these. Here, for
instance, is a beautiful illustration of the wonderful interdependence
of nature--of the golden chain of unsuspected relations which bind
together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full
and most diversified earth. Who, as he listened to the musical hum of
the great humble-bees, or marked their ponderous flight from flower to
flower, and watched the unpacking of their trunks for their work of
suction, would have supposed that the multiplication or diminution of
their race, or the fruitfulness and sterility of the red clover, depend
as directly on the vigilance of our cats as do those of our well-guarded
game-preserves on the watching of our keepers? Yet this Mr. Darwin has
discovered to be literally the case:--

From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found that the
visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of
clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium
pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very
little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or
very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very