rse tend rather
towards the justification of Mr. Darwin, than towards his
condemnation; for they seem to show the perfect competence of matter
and force, as regards divisibility and distribution, to bear the
heaviest strain that he has hitherto imposed upon them.

In the case of Mr. Darwin, observation, imagination, and reason
combined have run back with wonderful sagacity and success over a
certain length of the line of biological succession. Guided by
analogy, in his 'Origin of Species' he placed at the root of life a
primordial germ, from which he conceived the amazing variety of the
organisms now upon earth's surface might be deduced. If this
hypothesis were even true, it would not be final. The human mind
would infallibly look behind the germ, and however hopeless the
attempt, would enquire into the history of its genesis. In this dim
twilight of conjecture the searcher welcomes every gleam, and seeks to
augment his light by indirect incidences. He studies the methods of
nature in the ages and the worlds within his reach, in order to shape
the course of speculation in antecedent ages and worlds. And though
the certainty possessed by experimental enquiry is here shut out, we
are not left entirely without guidance. From the examination of the
solar system, Kant and Laplace came to the conclusion that its various
bodies once formed parts of the same undislocated mass; that matter in
a nebulous form preceded matter in its present form; that as the ages
rolled away, heat was wasted, condensation followed, planets were
detached; and that finally the chief portion of the hot cloud reached,
by self-compression, the magnitude and density of our sun. The earth
itself offers evidence of a fiery origin; and in our day the
hypothesis of Kant and Laplace receives the independent countenance of
spectrum analysis, which proves the same substances to be common to
the earth and sun.

Accepting some such view of the construction of our system as
probable, a desire immediately arises to connect the present life of
our planet with the past. We wish to know something of our remotest
ancestry. On its first detachment from the central mass, life, as we
understand it, could not have been present on the earth. How, then,
did it come there? The thing to be encouraged here is a reverent
freedom--a freedom preceded by the hard discipline which checks
licentiousness in speculation--while the thing to be repressed, both
in science