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    ordinary scientific writings , its style is certainly of rare excellence ; -but ore because they are detestable , than because it is exquisite . Lucid in Satement , copious in varied knowledge , grave , pious , and gentle in tone , IS work unquestionably is ; but its success does not he there ; it might Kv « had all these qualities in tenfold degree , and yet have borne no ^ tenth edition '' on its title-page , had there not also been novelty and mrandeur of conception — novelty to-startle , grandeur to enlarge and minas

    satisfy the intellectual longings ot meditative . ^ . ,, We hold the Vestiges to be in some minor respects inaccurate and mnamvlete both in knowledge and in a right conception of the Development Svpothesis . It will be our task to indicate some of these points in the bourse of the present review ; but our readers must be fully aware of the unhesitating admiration uniformly expressed in this journal for the philosophic value Of the Vestiges , and of our repeated defence of its doctrines . Had the author been among our readers , he would have made an exception in the following charge : —

    « It has never bad a single declared adherent—and nine editions have been sold . Obloquy has been poured upon the nameless author from a score of sources . —and his leading idea , iu a subdued form , finds its way into books of science , and gives a direction to research . Professing adversaries write books in imitation of his , and , with the benefit of a few concessions to prejudice , contrive to obtain the avour denied to him . " Certainly the treatment the work has received from antagonists has b een the reverse of philosophical . On more than one occasion we have exposed the foolish haste and triumphant chuckle with which even cautious men have incautiously snatched at any semblance of a fact or argument supposed to overthrow the Vestiges ; and we quote with a chuckle on our side the quiet rebuke given to geologists so eager to disprove an invertebrate era :

    " Thus a great array of instances of fish in the Lower Silurians and lower portions of the Upper Silurians was made up , to the assumed confusion of the advocates of the development hypothesis . Mr . Miller penned an eloquent chapter on the subject , speculating on . tho sv / . c p . nd character of the animals , and not failing to apologise for the tediou 3 ness to which he was condemned by his adherence to facts , Le being in this respect at a great disadvantage in comparison with the ingenious theorist who has only a fancy picture to make up . " Will it ever be believed by ^ he readers of Mr . Miller ' s ingenious book , that not one of the i facts' oA which he is so fearful of being tedious , is a fact at all ? From a very competent authority , ' we learn that the seven species of fish from the Wenlock Ijimestone , believed in by Professor Sedgwick , because he had < seen' them , turn out to have been found in the debris qfi a quarry of that rock , where it is admitted they had most probably been dropped from the pocket of some workman

    who had obtained them in a neighbouring quarry of a higher formation ! The Onchus spine from the Bala Limestone had been entered by the government surveyors , as a fragment of fish , after only a ' cursory examination ; ' it proves to be , * in reality , half the rostral shield of a trilobite ! ' * Its resemblance' to an Onchus was due merely to its being broken in half and obscured by stone . ' In like manner , the spine from the Llandeillo flags , certified as such by ' one of the most cautious and practised geologists of the present age , ' has been declared to be nothing but a piece of ' a new genus of Asteroid Zoophyte , ' something lower in creation than even the Bala spine proved to be ! While these vexing discoveries have been in progress , Professor Phillips has withdrawn his authority from the remains in the Wenlock Shale , and the low position assigned to the American specimen by Mr . Miller has not been sustained . In short , the whole of this chapter , which Mr . Miller feared would be tedious from its adherence to ' sober fact , ' ought to be the

    most amusing ( and I am afraid it really is so ) in his whole book , seeing that it consists only of the purest fictions , the fictions of over-hasty science . " In his fourth edition ( 1851 ) Mr . Miller inserts a note announcing that the Biipposed ichthyic remains from the Bala Limestones have ' proved , on closer investigation , to be spurious . ' So much he had then discovered . But coprolites had been found in that ancient group of rocks , bearing witness to the existence of vertobrata in those ancient seas . In reality , there have been only found , in the Llandeillo rocks , ' certain rounded black substances , ' which ' suggested the idea of coprolites , ' and in which a largo proportion of phosphate of lime in detected . An inference from chemical science respecting sin object standing so fur out from the region where there are any cognate facts to support it , will not of course go a great way with ordinary philosopher ; but such fucts have a peculiar value for opponents of the development hypothesis , and we may of course expect to find this kept by

    them fully in vio \ v . " Mr . Miller has not yet , however , exhausted his traces of vertebrate life in the Lower Silurians . ' The com \ so of discovery , ' says ho , ' has added greatly more to the evidence previously accumulated against the Lamarckian than it has withdrawn . The track of a quadruped has recently been found imprinted on a Lower Silurian sandstone in North America . '

    " It is very unfortunato for evidence of thin kind , that it is only added to ho immediately after withdrawn . The Canada slabs with chelonian tracks reigned for a timo in 1 . 851 . Professor Owen , when he had seen only a few , gave his opinion that the peculiarities ' pointed to tho Reptilia , ' and ho ' inclined to refer them to a flpoeios of Terrapono or Emydian Tortoise / Tho President of tho Geological Society gave his countenance to this idea in his annual address of that year . To find tlmt not merely fish , but reptiles , had lived coevally with tho hitherto supposed protozoic mollusks and trilobites , wns a discovery oven exceeding tho wishes of such won an Mr . Miller . More- slabs , however , camo to England ; some whispers of doubt boguu to circulate ; mid tho learned Hunterian Professor was induced in "pring 1852 , to give the whole subject a now and more searching investigation . The- result appears in a most ingenious and laborious papor , presented , with many excellent illustrations , in tho'Quarterly Journal of tho Geological Society . Mr . Owon Hioro arrives at tho conclusion that tho foot-tracks aro not cholonian , but

    crustacean . thuH leaving that early ago still invortebrate . " Ijofc us also remark on tho insolent assumption that the author of the Vestiges is not worth hearing , bocauso ho is a moro " dabbler , " whose fiiots aro not to bo trusted to , whose theories aro " dreams . " Wo call tniH insolont , because it is an assumption in defiance- of tho clearest ovidoneo to tho contrary , arid ia made by men who aro themselves quite « a much open to the ohar o . To tako even tho examp le which will tell tho least iu our favour : what ia Professor Sodgwick but a " dabbler in

    embryology , and a very shallow dabbler , too P Yet , in his own department , he is an authority ; and if he is open to the charge , what shall we say to the hundreds strong in no department who attempt to throw discredit on the facts used in the Vestiges , because the author is a dabbler , although the facts are those countenanced by the very highest authorities in each department . To say that these authorities repudiate the use made of the facts ¦ , and declare them not to signify what they are made to signify in the Vestiges , is throwing no discredit on the facts , it is only removing the discussion from the ground of facts to that of philosophy— -ground , by the way , on which , men of science are frequently children .

    It is important , however , that the general reader should understand that , iii spite of the violent language of Sedgwick and others , the . facts on which the Vestiges is mainly founded , are those sanctioned by the greatest names in science . To call the inferences deduced therefrom by the author in the elaboration of his "hypothesis , " ( he calls it nothing more , ) by the contemptuous name of " dreams , " may be a compendious way of refuting them , but will not be greatly satisfying to sincere inquirers .

    So much for " inaccuracy . " Further , let it be noted , that the author has been willing enough to retract some statements , and modify others , when the suggested corrections were correct ; but these corrections have in no decrree altered the hypothesis , for that hypothesis was not dependent upon one fact , but upon a million , so that one more or less left it undisturbed—a point opponents have overlooked . Indeed , one may say of the " blunders" so complacently noted , what may be said of the general scope of the arguments employed against the Hypothesis—just as men of science overlook the broad , massive demonstrations of cumulated facts , because of some few apparent exceptions and inconsistencies , so do critics overlook the great coercive arguments of the Vestiges because a fact here or an illustration there may be misstated or misapplied . wiui tne oi

    Then as to " shallowness : it some acquaintance writings philosophers confessedly profound entitles us to pronounce on such a question , we should say no charge is more frivolous than that , lhe Vestiges strikes us as being a piece of co-ordinated thinking very remarkable among mod ern books , considering it with reference to the homogeneity and integrity of the speculations withJ ; lie adduced facts . As the author justly says : — - « To-be , a superficial book , it has been remarkably hard to understand . It has also appeared that they were only able to make-up a show of objection to the scientific data on which the work is founded , by misrepresenting these data , by

    -igrnorimrall the highest authorities , and by clutching at immature announcements which turned out to be fictions . It has been shown that the propositions of the work which they misunderstood or misrepresented , are in reality admitted or maintained by themselves . From their own writings it has been possible to collect those proofs of progressive organization , the existence of which they denied . It has been shown that they do not know the tendency of the facts of their own sciences and blunder whenever they attempt to reason upon them : —Professor Sedgwick , for example , corroborating at one place all the great truths which he has contradicted at another , and only truly contradicting and condemning

    himself . " There is no discovery in it ; there is no fathom-line cast into the depths of thought ; there is little strictly original in the ideas ; but there is an original bringing together of widely-scattered facts and ideas ; there is that originality which consists in thinking out to their conclusions the premises derived from others . If compared with Humboldt s muchlauded chaos , named Cosmos , its philosophic superiority will be as evident as its ' inferiority in scientific acquirement . m two to it

    We said the Vestiges had novelty and grandeur— wings carry victorious through the storm of polemics . Had it been a vamped up reproduction of De Maillet and Lamarck ( as is fluently asserted by those who never read Lamarck and never saw De Maillet ' s book ); if it had been as " inaccurate" and " shallow" as incompetent adversaries desire us to believe , it would never have survived so much " refutation and so much scorn . But it is novel ; and the novelty consists in linking on the hypothesis of Laplace to a modification of the hypothesis of Lamarck , and thus bringing the phenomena of tho inorganic and organic worlds under one magnificent generalization of progressive development : — " He had heard of the hypothesis of Lamarck ; but it seemed to him to proceed upon a vicious circle , and ho dismissed it as wholly inadequate to account for the oxistenco of the animated species . Ho was not acquainted with the works of St .

    Hilaire , but through such treatises on physiology ab had fallen in his way , he was awaro of some of the transcendental views of that science entertained both in Franco and England . With the aid of tliese , in conjunction with some knowledge of tho succession of fossils in the series of rock-formations , ho applied himself to tho task of elucidating tho Great Mystery , as it was frequently termed by men of Bcienco . Ho did not do so—as far as ho knows himself , —in tin irreverent apint , or with a hostile design to any form of faith or code of morals . Ho viewed tho inquiry as simply philosophical , and felt assured that our conception of tho divine Author of Nature could never bo truly injured by any additional insight wo might ,

    gain into His works and ways . . Before concluding , wo must call attention to ono point which Jiaa surprised us in tho history of his labours . Ho perceived clearly at tuo outset that Embryology furnishes tho real clue to tho whole nivsteiy , and yet , strange to say . ho lias bestowed far less attention on it than on Natural History and Geology . It may not ; bo within his reaoh to study that fascinating science cUreotly ; but indirectly , from manyaorks ho might have mastered ascertained results . JTo should have learned anatomy to master them . Is it too late to direct his attention to tho works of Von Baor , Rathke , Tiodomann , Mu lor , Valentin Bisohoff , amon ; Germans ; and Sorres , Geoflroy and Isidore St . Hilaire , Ooato , Velpoau , and Martin do St . Ange , among 1 ' renchmen not to mention English works P With a little preliminary anatomy , ho would find a rioli anjl fruitful crop of results in most of these works ; such as would give greater depth and certainty to his viewfl . In our noxfc wo ehall onter into an invoatigution of those views .

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    A ^ ^ st 13 , 1853 . ] THE LEADER . 785

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Aug. 13, 1853, page 785, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1999/page/17/