to them, or
whether, on the other hand, he has been led to over-estimate the
value of his principle of natural selection, as greatly as Lamarck
overestimated his vera causa of modification by exercise.

But there is, at all events, one advantage possessed by the more recent
writer over his predecessor. Mr. Darwin abhors mere speculation as
nature abhors a vacuum. He is as greedy of cases and precedents as any
constitutional lawyer, and all the principles he lays down are capable
of being brought to the test of observation and experiment. The path
he bids us follow professes to be, not a mere airy track, fabricated of
ideal cobwebs, but a solid and broad bridge of facts. If it be so, it
will carry us safely over many a chasm in our knowledge, and lead us to
a region free from the snares of those fascinating but barren Virgins,
the Final Causes, against whom a high authority has so justly warned us.
"My sons, dig in the vineyard," were the last words of the old man
in the fable; and, though the sons found no treasure, they made their
fortunes by the grapes.

End of The Darwinian Hypothesis.

TIME AND LIFE.*

([Footnote] *"Macmillan's Magazine", December 1859.)

MR. DARWIN'S "ORIGIN OF SPECIES".

Everyone knows that that superficial film of the earth's substance,
hardly ten miles thick, which is accessible to human investigation, is
composed for the most part of beds or strata of stone, the consolidated
muds and sands of former seas and lakes, which have been deposited
one upon the other, and hence are the older the deeper they lie. These
multitudinous strata present such resemblances and differences among
themselves that they are capable of classification into groups or
formations, and these formations again are brigaded together into still
larger assemblages, called by the older geologists, primary, secondary,
and tertiary; by the moderns, palaeozoic, mesozoic, and cainozoic: the
basis of the former nomenclature being the relative age of the groups of
strata; that of the latter, the kinds of living forms contained in them.

Though but a film if compared with the total diameter of our planet,
the total series of formations is vast indeed when measured by any human
standard, and, as all action implies time, so are we compelled to regard
these mineral masses as a measure of the time which has elapsed during
their accumulation. The amount of the time which they represent is, of
course, in the inverse propo