rare or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district
depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy
their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the
habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two-thirds of them are
thus destroyed all over England." Now the number of mice is largely
dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Mr. Newman
says, "near villages and small towns I have found the nests of
humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the
number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence, it is quite credible
that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district
might determine, through the intervention, first of mice, and then of
bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district.--p. 74.

* * * * *

Now, all this is, we think, really charming writing. We feel as we walk
abroad with Mr. Darwin very much as the favoured object of the attention
of the dervise must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his
eye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, and diamonds, and
emeralds, and topazes, and rubies, which were sparkling unregarded
beneath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes save those which the
dervise had enlightened. But here we are bound to say our pleasure
terminates; for, when we turn with Mr. Darwin to his "argument," we are
almost immediately at variance with him. It is as an "argument" that the
essay is put forward; as an argument we will test it.

We can perhaps best convey to our readers a clear view of Mr. Darwin's
chain of reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them,
first, the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them; next, the leading
propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final
inference; and then the mode by which he endeavours to support his
propositions.

The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all
the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is
now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state
in the great Earth-Museum around us, which the science of geology
unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of
descent from father to son,--"animals from at most four or five
progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number" (p. 484), as Mr.
Darwin at first somewhat diffidently sugge