extraordinary phenomenon of physical creation, but hardly so
marvellous and incomprehensible as the beginning, progress, and end of
the divers orders of marine and terrestrial beings that filled each
world of life. It is to geologists, to PLAYFAIR, HUTTON, LYELL,
BUCKLAND, SEDGWICK, OWEN, and other great names, native and foreign, to
whom we are indebted for this singular revelation of Nature's works. It
is their unwearied research that has opened to us the surprising
spectacle we have attempted briefly to describe of the diversified
groups of species which have, in the course of the earth's history,
succeeded each other at vast intervals of time; one set of animals and
plants wholly or partly disappearing from the face of our planet, and
others, which apparently did not before exist, becoming the only or
predominant occupants of the globe.

Now the great question arises--whence, by what power, or by what law,
were these reiterated transitions brought about? Were the organized
species of one geological epoch, by some long-continued agency of
natural causes, transmuted into other and succeeding species? or were
there an extinction of species, and a replacement of them by others,
through special and miraculous acts of creation? or, lastly, did species
gradually degenerate and die out from the influence of the altered and
unfavourable physical conditions in which they were placed, and be
supplanted by immigrants of different species, and to which the new
conditions were more congenial?

The last, we confess, is the view to which we are most inclined--first,
because we think a transmutation of species, from a lower to a higher
type, has not been satisfactorily proved; and second, because of the
strong impression we entertain, that the universe, subject to certain
cyclical and determinate mutations, was made complete at first, with
self-subsisting provisions for its perpetual renewal and conservation.
We shall advert to this matter hereafter; but at present it is the
conclusions of the author of the _Vestiges_ that claim consideration. He
adopts the first interpretation of animal phenomena, namely, that there
has been a transmutation of species, that the scale of creation has been
gradually advancing in virtue of an inherent and organic law of
development. Nature, he contends, began humbly; her first works were of
simple form, which were gradually meliorated by circumstances favourable
to improvement, and that everywhere a