t orders of
ideas, and insists that man as a physical being is clearly of the same
order as the gorilla and ape; and he does not shrink from accepting the
possibility that they all may have sprung by successive stages or
'leaps' from the same primordial form. His concluding words are, that
'so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction
into the earth at successive periods of life--sensation, instinct, the
intelligence of the higher mammalia, bordering on reason--and lastly the
improvable reason of man himself, presents us with a picture of the
ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter.'

To our mind one thing is certain. The whole scientific world is drifting
slowly, but steadily and surely, to the verification and
acceptance--with certain and in some cases important modifications--of
the development hypothesis of Maillet, Lamarck, La Place, Owen, and the
author of the 'Vestiges[4] of Creation.' The movement reminds one of
the motion of one of the great Greenland glaciers, so slow, quiet,
almost imperceptible, yet inexorable as fate--heedless of all obstacles.
As in the case of all great, genuine revolutionary or formative ideas,
it is curious to watch the incidents of its career--to note the alarm,
indignation, scorn, and holy horror occasioned by its first
announcement--to observe these subsiding gradually into patient
endurance and permissive sufferance, and these again giving place to a
certain curiosity and wakeful interest, culminating at last in downright
advocacy and championship.

We are inclined to think that great injustice has been done the
development theory in the name of morals and religion. There has been no
end to the railing against it on the part of clergymen, Biblical
interpreters, theological Professors, and orthodox editors. It was held
to put infinite dishonor upon the Creator, not only to suppose that He
should take many millions of years to make a world, but that He should
employ the same lengthened period to make man, instead of speaking him
into existence by a word. It was held to put infinite dishonor upon the
Scriptures to suppose that they should be understood in any but the most
literal sense. And it was held to put infinite dishonor upon man to
suppose that he was kith and kin with the monkey--bone of the bone and
flesh of the flesh of the unreasoning quadrupeds, over which in his
god-like royalty he was to sway his imperial sceptre--and this, too, by
a class