by his firm belief in their nutritive sufficiency! To more intelligible propositions in support of his hypothesis, we marginally noted, as we perused them, the difficulties or exceptions which rose in our mind. We have still room for a few of these illustrations of the groundwork of "natural selection." "From looking at species as only strongly marked and well-defined varieties, I was led to anticipate that the species of the larger genera in each country would oftener present varieties, than the species of the smaller genera. To test the truth of this anticipation I have arranged the plants of twelve countries, and the coleopterous insects of two districts, into two nearly equal masses, the species of the larger genera on one side, and those of the smaller genera on the other side, and it has invariably proved to be the case that a larger proportion of the species on the side of the larger genera present varieties, than on the side of the smaller genera."-P. 55. be sustained by laws and rules of a like erality of application. gen "Nine fawns Mr. Darwin's argument for a common origin of all the varieties of dovecot pigeon, leads him to affirm, "all recent experience shows that it is most difficult to get any wild animal to breed freely under domestication." (P. 24.) But the recent experience at different story. Three young individuals, the Zoological Gardens of London tells a two males and one female, of those most strange exotic quadrupeds, the giraffe, were transported from their African wilderness to the menagerie in Regent's Park in 1836. No sooner had they attained the proper age in 1838 than they bred; and there has been no other interval in the repetition of the act than that which the phenomena of a fifteen months' gestation and seven months' suckling necessarily interpose. have been produced without any casualty." A pair of the largest and wildest of anteThe elephant is, however, a small genus, lopes (the Eland, A. Oreas) is transported indeed, one of the smallest in the sense of from the boundless sunny plains of South the number of species composing it, which Africa to the confinement of a park in cloudy are indeed but two, the Elephas Indicus and and rainy Lancashire; they breed freely Elephas Africanus of Cuvier. But the range there, and become the parents of clands now of variety in both African and Indian kinds widely distributed over Great Britain, and is by no means inconsiderable. Livingstone promising in another century to be as comadds instances in the clephants of the Zam-mon in our parks as fallow deer.† What besi, and the terms "Dauntelah," "Mook- conditions might seem more adverse to health nah," etc., applied by the Indian and Sin- and procreative power than such as are exghalese entrappers of the wild proboscidians emplified by the contrast of the den and the to the different varieties that are captured, pond appropriated to the hippopotamus in still more exemplify this tendency to vary in the Jardin des Plantes, with that noble river individuals of a "small genus." Another where these most uncouth of African wild exception to Mr. Darwin's rule as strongly beasts disported themselves prior to their and quickly suggests itself in the genus Pith-capture? Before two years elapse after the ecus. Naturalists seem unwilling to admit arrival of the young male and female, they more species than the Bornean Pongo (Pith- produce a fine offspring. ecus Wurmbii, seu Satyrus of Wurmb), and the smaller orang (P. morio) since established by Owen. But the varieties in regard to the cranial crests, to color, to relative length of arms, appears by a memoir from the pen of the latter naturalist, to be both numerous and well marked. On the other hand, the species of the antelope genus have not hitherto presented any notable varieties to the observation of naturalists; and yet the genus, in respect to the number of these species, is one of the largest in the mammalian class. There may be, of course, a difference in different classes,of organisms in this respect. Plants and invertebrates may better exemplify Mr. Darwin's proposition than fishes, reptiles, or quadrupeds. But an hypothesis applied to all living things can only *"Characters of the skull of the malo Pithecus morio, with remarks on the varieties of Pithecus Satyrus," by Professor Owen. Zoological Transactions, vol. iv. p. 163. 1856, Such are the signs of defective information which contribute, almost at each chapter, to check our confidence in the teachings and advocacy of the hypothesis of "Natural Selection." But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements clude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of natural history facts. Thus he says: "I think it highly probable that our domestic dogs have "descended from several wild species." It may be so; but what are the species here referred to? Are they known, or named, or can they be defined? If so, why are they not indicated, so that the naturalist might have some means of judging of the degree of probability, or value of the surmise, and of its bearing on the hypothesis? "Isolation, also," says Mr. Darwin, "is an important element in the process of natu *Edinb. Review, January, 1860, p. 179. ፡፡ ral selection." But how can one select if a thing be "isolated? Even using the word in the sense of a confined area, Mr. Darwin admits that the conditions of life throughout such area, will tend to modify all the individuals of a species in the same manner, in relation to the same conditions." (P. 104.) No evidence, however, is given of a species having ever been created in that way; but granting the hypothetical influence and transmutation, there is no selection here. The author adds, “Although I do not doubt that isolation is of considerable importance in the production of new species, on the whole, I am inclined to believe, that largeness of area is of more importance in the production of species capable of spreading widely."-P. 105. Now, on such a question as the origin of species, and in an express, formal, scientific treatise on the subject, the expression of a belief, where one looks for a demonstration, is simply provoking. We are not concerned in the author's beliefs or inclinations to believe. Belief is a state of mind short of actual knowledge. It is a state which may govern action, when based upon a tacit admission of the mind's incompetency to prove a proposition, coupled with submissive acceptance of an authoritative dogma, or worship of a favorite idol of the mind. We readily concede, and it needs, indeed, no ghost to reveal the fact, that the wider the area in which a species may be produced, the more widely it will spread. But we fail to discern its import in respect of the great question at issue. We have read and studied with care most of the monographs conveying the results of close investigations of particular groups of animals but have not found what Darwin asserts to be the fact, at least as regards all those investigators of particular groups of animals and plants whose treatises he has read, viz., that their authors "are, one and all, firmly convinced that each of the wellmarked forms or species was at the first independently created." Our experience has been that the monographers referred to have rarely committed themselves to any conjectural hypothesis whatever, upon the origin of the species which they have closely studied. Darwin appeals from the "experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts" which he assumes to have been "viewed from a point of view opposite to his own," to the "few naturalists endowed with much flexibility of mind," for a favorable reception of his hypothesis. We must confess that the minds to whose conclusions we incline to bow belong to that truth-loving, truth-seeking, truth-imparting class, which Robert Brown,* Bojanus,† Rudolphi, Cuvier, Ehrenberg,§ Herold,|| Kölliker, and Siebold, worthily exemplify. The rightly and sagaciously generalizing intellect is associated with the power of endurance of continuous and laborious research, exemplarily manifested in such monographs as we have quoted below. Their authors are the men who trouble the intellectual world little with their beliefs, but enrich it greatly with their proofs. If close and long-continued research sustained by the determination to get accurate results, blunted, as Mr. Darwin seems to imply, the far-seeing discovering faculty, then are we driven to this paradox, viz., that the elucidation of the higher problems, nay the highest in biology, is to be sought for or expected in the lucubrations of those naturalists whose minds are not weighted or troubled with more than a discursive and superficial knowledge of nature. Lasting and fruitful conclusions have, indeed, hitherto been based only on the possession of knowledge; now we are called upon to accept an hypothesis on the plea of want of knowledge. The geological record, it is averred, is so imperfect! But what human record is not? Especially must the record of past organisms be much less perfect than of present ones. We freely admit it. But when Mr. Darwin, in reference to the absence of the intermediate fossil forms required by his hypothesis-and only the zootomical zoologist can approximatively appreciate their immense numbers-the countless hosts of transitional links which, on "natural selection," must certainly have existed at one period or another of the world's history-when Mr. Darwin exclaims what may be, or what may not be, the forms yet forthcoming out of the graveyards of strata, we would reply, that our only ground for prophesying of what may come, is by the analogy of what has come to light. We may expect, e.g., a chambered-shell from a secondary rock; but not the evidence of a creature linking on the cuttle-fish to the lump-fish. Mr. Darwin asks, "How is it that varieties, which I have called incipient species, become ultimately good and distinct species?' To which we rejoin with the question :-Do they become good and distinct species? Is there any one instance proved by observed *Prodromus Flora Nova Hollandiæ. † Anatome Testudinis Europææ. ques. Mémoires pour servir à l'Anatomie des Mollus ganismen. Die Infusionsthierchen, als vollkommene Or|| Disquisitiones de Animalium vertebris carentium, etc. Entwickelungsgeschichte des Cephalopoden facts of such transmutation? We have searched the volume in vain for such. When we see the intervals that divide most species from their nearest congeners, in the recent and especially the fossil series, we either doubt the fact of progressive conversion, or, as Mr. Darwin remarks in his letter to Dr. Asa Gray, one's "imagination must fill up very wide blanks." The last ichthyosaurus, by which the genus disappears in the chalk, is hardly distinguishable specifically from the first ichthyosaurus, which abruptly introduces that strange form of sea-lizard in the lias. The oldest Pterodactyle is as thorough and complete a one as the latest. No contrast can be more remarkable, nor, we believe, more instructive, than the abundance of evidence of the various species of ichthyosaurus throughout the marine strata of the oolitic and cretaceous periods, and the utter blank in reference to any form calculated to enlighten us as to whence the ichthyosaurus came, or what it graduated into, before or after those periods. The Enaliosauria of the secondary seas were superseded by the Cetacea of the tertiary ones. Professor Agassiz affirms: cially in Florida, with sufficient precision to ascertain that it must take about eight thousand years for one of those coral walls to rise from its foundation to the level of the surface of the ocean. There are around the southernmost excentric with one another, which can be shown to tremity of Florida alone, four such reefs, conhave grown up one after the other. This gives for the beginning of the first of these reefs an age of over thirty thousand years; and yet the corals by which they were all built up are the same identical species in all of them. These facts, then, furnish as direct evidence as we can obtain in any branch of physical inquiry, that some, at least, of the species of animals now cxsand years, and have not undergone the slightisting, have been in existence over thirty thouest change during the whole of that period.”* 66 To this, of course, the transmutationists reply that a still longer period of time might do what thirty thousand years have not done. Professor Baden Powell, for example, affirms:--- Though each species may have possessed its peculiarities unchanged for a lapse of time, the fact that when long periods are considered, all those of our earlier period are replaced by new ones at a later period, proves that species change in the end, provided a sufficiently long time is granted." But here lies the fallacy: it "Between two successive geological periods, merely proves that species are changed, it changes have taken place among plants and gives us no evidence as to the mode of animals. But none of these primordial forms change; transmutation, gradual or abrupt, of life which naturalists call species, are known is in this case mere assumption. We have to have changed during any of these periods. It cannot be denied that the species of different no objection on any score to the change; we successive periods are supposed by some nat- have the greatest desire to know how it is uralists to derive their distinguishing features brought about. Owen has long stated his from changes which have taken place in those belief that some pre-ordained law or secondof preceding ages, but this is a mere supposition, ary cause is operative in bringing about the supported neither by physiological nor by geo- change; but our knowledge of such law, if logical evidence; and the assumption that ani- such exists, can only be acquired on the premals and plants may change in a similar man- scribed terms. We, therefore, regard the ner during one and the same period is equally painstaking and minute comparisons by gratuitous."+ Cuvier of the osteological and every other character that could be tested in the mummified ibis, cat, or crocodile, with those of the species living in his time; and the equally philosophical investigations of the polypes operating at an interval of thirty thousand years in the building up of coral reefs, by the profound paleontologist of Neuchatel, as of far higher value in reference to the inductive determination of the question of the origin of species than the speculations of Demaillet, Buffon, Lamarck, Vestiges," Baden Powell, or Darwin. Cuvier adduced the evidence of the birds and beasts which had been preserved in the tombs of Egypt, to prove that no change in their specific characters had taken place during the thousands of years-two, three, or five-which had elapsed, according to the monumental evidence, since the individuals of those species were the subjects of the mummifier's skill. Professor Agassiz adduces evidence to show that there are animals of species now living which have been for a much longer period inhabitants of our globe. "It has been possible," he writes, "to trace the formation and growth of our coral reefs, espe* Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 1858, p. 61. † Contributions to Natural History: Essay on Classification, p. 51. 66 The essential element in the complex idea of species, as it has been variously framed relationship between all the individuals of and defined by naturalists, viz., the bloodsuch species, is annihilated on the hypothesis of "natural selection." According to * Ibid., p. 53. this view a genus, a family, an order, a class, ture, and procreative phenomena, of the a sub-kingdom,-the individuals severally truth of the opposite proposition, that "classrepresenting these grades of difference or ification is the task of science, but species relationship,-now differ from individuals of the work of nature," we believe that this the same species only in degree: the species, aphorism will endure; we are certain that it like every other group, is a mere creature has not yet been refuted; and we repeat in of the brain; it is no longer from nature. the words of Linnæus, "Classis et Ordo est With the present evidence from form, struc- sapientiæ, Species naturæ opus." AN ENGLISHI LADY OF RANK AS THE WIFE | gering gait of the Bedouin, he disappoints every OF A BEDOUIN CHIEF.-" Hadji," the Syrian correspondent of the Boston Traveller, furnishes the following account of the freaks of an Eng lish lady of rank and beauty, who has lately become the wife of a Bedouin chief: "At the hotel of Mr. Rarcy I found a most singular specimen of the English woman, who seems to emulate the character of the famous and once powerful Lady Hester Stanhope. Known as Lady Digby, she excites the mirth and ridicule of the natives, but as the wife of Sheikh Miguil-the Bedouin chief of Damascus -she wields a powerful influence among the Bedouins of the desert. Possessed of an ample fortune, Lady Ellenborough, once the favorite of the court of St. James, after her fall and divorce the wife of a Russian nobleman, and then of a Greek prince, established herself in Damascus a few years ago. Here she prevailed upon a noted Bedouin chief to put away his wives and live with her. They spend their winters in town and their summers in the desert, where she visits the old wives of the sheikh, tak ing with her many beautiful presents to appease their wrath and jealousy. one who sees him; for one would naturally ex- MR. CHURCH сvinces almost as much inven " tion in bestowing names upon his pictures as he does in painting them. "Twilight in the Wilderness," the title of his new landscape is almost as good a name as "The Heart of the Andes ; and there are many who think the new picture is the better one of the two. It has, without a doubt, more poetical feeling and unity of design, and, in certain parts, has never been excelled by any of his previous performances. Now, that he has finished this picture, he will probably go to work upon his studies of icebergs, which ho brought from Newfoundland last year, and give us a composition of ocean grandeurs worthy of a companionship with his Niagara, his Heart of the Andes, and his Twilight in the Wilderness. "She has frequently been seen in the desert, habited in the one loose robe of the children of the sandy waste, barefooted and bareheaded.-Tribune. In Damascus she wears the long white sheet, which covers her figure, but lives in good English style, still retaining the luxuries of civilized life and a French maid. Her constant attendance upon Protestant worship, when in town, gives travellers frequent opportunities of seeing her; and being a majestic woman in appearance, and still retaining traces of a wondrous beauty, she always excites attention and inquiry. I hear that she has lately had her marriage with the sheikh legalized by the cadi of Damascus, and recorded by the British consulate. CLERGYMEN who wish to know how to advise, manage, or direct certain worldly, discordant and troublesome members, may find it worth while to have the heads of such examined, their true characters thoroughly delineated and laid open to view, by which they may be the better enabled to govern themselves, and to make less trouble. Professor Fowler, 308 Broadway, gives his exclusive attention to practical phrenology. Clergymen are invited to call. an "Her lord and master-for in this country a A FRAGMENT of his dearly bought experience husband is most emphatically a lord of crea- is given incidentally by Mr. Sala, in his last tion '-possesses nothing either in face or figure paper on "Hogarth," where he relates how to attract a woman of cultivated taste. Small early patron once pressed him to write " in stature, darker than a mulatto, with small, good poem -"in the Byron style," you piercing black eyes, and walking with the swag"know," and offered him a guinea for it down. a From Chambers's Journal. had for two years been knocking about the ocean, and must, under any circumstances, have travelled many thousand miles, let its course have been what it might. Seventeen years ago, it occurred to Commander Becher that the Nautical Magazine might be made the vehicle for a systematic record of these interesting bottle-voyages. For a period of thirty or forty years previously, the newspapers had occasional paragraphs to the effect that a bottle had been " picked up," containing such and such items of information; and the question arose, whether these records, collected and tabu IN the month of May, 1859, a South Australian fisherman saw a bottle washed on shore near the mouth of the river Murray. He picked it up, and found it quite incrusted with small shells. On opening the bottle, a piece of paper appeared, on which a few words were written, to the effect that the writer was on board a ship coming from Liverpool; that on the 4th of May, 1857, the ship was near the Cape de Verd Islands; that the paper, enclosed in a bottle, was about to be cast into the sea; and that the finder of the paper, whoever he might be, was re-lated, might not in time give useful informaquested to send it to the writer's brother at Sheffield. Let us make the singular voyage of this paper the text for a brief discourse. be tion concerning the currents, tides, and winds of the ocean. Each record, it is true, is subject to possible calamities, numerous and varied. If the bottle be not well corked and That light, solid bodies, floating on the sealed, water will enter, and bottle and pasurface of the ocean, will move hither and per will go to the bottom. If it strikes thither by the action of ebb and flood against a rock, its fate is equally disastrous. tide, we all know; that a strong wind will If it floats to some shore, it may be at a spot have the same effect, irrespective of tide, we where it escapes human observation for a also know; and sailors know, if landsmen do year or more, or even forever. If it be really not, that there are moving currents in the picked up and opened, the contents may ocean independent both of winds and tides. unreadable by the finder; or he may not But it is not known, until after long-contin- care about it; or he may be too poor or too ued and carefully made observations, what ignorant to forward the paper to the required is the average amount and direction of move- destination. Any one of these contingencies ment at any particular place. In all probability, he was no very profound philosopher who first conceived the idea of testing this matter by watching floating bodies on the surface of the water; it was rather the manner of realizing the idea, than the idea itself, that deserves notice. A glass bottle, or a metal vessel shaped like a bottle, will sink in water if left open, because the specific gravity of glass and metal is greater than that of water; but if the bottle be securely corked and sealed, it will float, on account of the interior being filled with air instead of water. Let us suppose that a passenger, on the way to Australia, throws such a bottle overboard: unless it strikes against a rock, it may float about for a long period of time. But how is the thrower ever to know whither the bottle will float, or on what shore it may be thrown? "Well," says some ingenious individual, whose name has not been handed down to posterity, "let us write a few words on a piece of paper, requesting the finder of the bottle to send the paper to some particular address." The right plan is hit upon. If the finder be good-natured enough to respond to the appeal, and, moreover, make a record of the when and the where of the finding, he may render it certain that the bottle has performed a long and curious voyage, although the details of the voyage are yet unknown. Thus the Australian fisherman picked up a bottle which may happen. Still, good may result from a collecting of those papers which do come safely to hand, even if they be only one in a hundred. So Commander Becher thought, and he carried out his plan in an ingenious manner. In order to keep his plan within practicable limits at first, he confined his attention to a portion of the Atlantic Ocean. He laid down a chart on Mercator's projection, extending from six degrees south latitude to sixty-three degrees north latitude; and from the coasts of Europe and Africa on the cast, to those of North and South America on the west. This chart he caused to be engraved to the size of about eighteen inches by twelve. On it he laid down a sort of history of every bottle-voyage of which authentic information had come to hand. He made a black spot to denote the place of the ship when the bottle was thrown into the sea; another spot to denote the place where the bottle was picked up; and a straight line connecting the two. He would of course have preferred to trace the crooked routeoften, doubtless, a very crooked route-which the bottle had really followed; but this was precisely the kind of knowledge which he did not possess, and which, indeed, was the very problem to be ultimately solved. One hundred and nineteen bottles had their voyages and travels put into print in this way. Very curious it is to see the lines of route as thus marked out. Some-let the actual course |