mous poem,

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ally engaged in contemplation of the mysteries of generation and reproduction, but it cannot be said that his guesses are invariably happy. Thus, in one place he maintains that man was originally an oyster, sprung into being by chance, and that by time alone he became first an amphibious and then a terrestrial animal. In the "Zoonomia" he threw over all speculations of this kind. The design of his book was to reform the system of medicine by putting forth a new science of life. Henceforward, the origin of humanity was to be traced to filaments. He does not recognize a God, though in his posthuThe Temple of Nature," he makes patronizing reference to the Great First Cause; and his creed at the "Botanic Garden" and "Zoonomia". period may best be judged by what we learn from his contemporaries. Mrs. Schimmel-Penninck, in the interesting fragment of autobiography which was published by her family a few years ago, allows us to see with tolerable clearness what his views really were. It is hardly necessary to say that he laughed at the idea of Christianity. On one occasion some person expressed a hope that he would one day accept it, and in reply he said, "Before I do, you Christians must be all agreed. This morning I received two parcels, one containing a work of Dr. Priestley's proving that there is no spirit, the other a work by Berkeley, proving that there is no matter. What am I to believe among you all?" From such a man it is obvious that the religious sense was in some way absent, and he certainly lost no opportunity of proving that it was. Consulted on one occasion by the friends of a devout young lady in very delicate health, he recommended them to "toss her religious books into the fire except Quarles's 'Emblems,' which may make her laugh." He further lost no opportunity of declaring himself a materialist in the grosser sense of the term. He often used to say, we learn from Mrs. Schimmel-Penninck, that "man is an eating animal, a drinking animal, and a sleeping animal, and one placed in a material world, which alone furnishes all that the human ani

mal can desire. He is gifted, besides, with knowing faculties, practically to explore and apply the resources of the

world to his use. These are realities. All else is nothing. Conscience and sentiment are but mere figments of the imagination. Man has but five gates of knowledge-the five senses. He can know nothing but through them; all else is a vain fancy; and as for the being of a God, the existence of a soul, or a world to come, who can know anything about them? Depend upon it, my dear madam, these are only the bugbears by which men of sense govern fools; nothing is real that is not an object of sense.

*

It is hardly necessary in this place to vindicate the spiritual nature of man. A doctrine so universally implanted in the human mind is not likely to be destroyed because a handful of "philosophers," whose vanity is at least equal to their attainments, choose to invent a new god for themselves. Nor can it be said that Dr. Darwin's new theories were much to be preferred to the old. notion, as developed in the "Zoonomia," is that all life originates in sensitive filaments. Give me," he says, "a fibre susceptible of irritation, and I will make a tree, a dog, a horse, a man." Elsewhere he says ("Zoonomia," vol. i. 493):

His

"I conceive the primordium or rudiment of the embryon, as secreted from the blood of the parent, to consist in a single living filament as a muscular fibre which I suppose to be the exthe retina is the extremity of a nerve of sensa tremity of a nerve of locomotion, as a fibre of

tion, as, for instance, one of the fibrils which compose the mouth of an absorbent vessel. I suppose this living filament of whatever form it may be, whether sphere, cube, or cylinder, to be endued with the capacity of being excited into action by certain kinds of stimulus. By the stimulus of the surrounding fluid in which it is received from the male, it may bend into a ring and thus form the beginning of a tube. This living ring may now embrace or absorb a nutritive particle of the fluid in which it swims, and by drawing it into its pores, or joining it by compression to its extremities, may increase its own length or crassitude, and by degrees the living ring may become a living tube. With this new organization or accretion of parts new kinds of irritability may commence."

And so on. Enough has probably been.

* Mr. Darwin disputes Mrs. Schimmel-Penninck's accuracy in this as in other matters. lapse of many years, she may have fallen into It may be that, writing as she did after the

some errors of detail, but of her general truthfulness it is impossible to entertain a doubt.

quoted, however, to show the nature of the philosophy which this materialistic leader professed. We need not attempt a discussion of its value. Voltaire, in a famous passage of not very decent sarcasm, has said all that is necessary on this subject. Nor need we trouble ourselves very much about some other speculations of the same kind in which Darwin indulged. He may be found, for example, speaking with approbation of a philosopher-unnamed, but presumably himself who thought it not impossible that the first insects were the anthers or stigmas of flowers, which had by some means loosed themselves from the parent plant. From these he imagines that other insects may have been formed in the course of a long period of time, some acquiring wings, others fins, and others claws from their ceaseless efforts to procure food or to protect themselves from injury. None of these changes," he adds, are more incomprehensible than the transformation of tadpoles into frogs or caterpillars into butterflies."

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In spite of all the apparent philosophy of these speculations, it may be doubted whether Darwin possessed a really scientific mind. The ideas upon which his Botanic Garden" is based were derived entirely from a study of the Linnæan system, and not to speak profanely that immortal work itself is apt to remind the reader of those histories of England in rhyme which enterprising school mistresses indite with the object of assisting the feeble memories of their pupils. The religious and moral reflections of these latter specimens of "goody" literature have their counterpart in the outbursts of rather dreary scepticism-religious and political-in which the "Botanic Garden" abounds. Nor is much more to be said for the imagined identity of animal and vegetable life, which Darwin appears to conceive to have been completely made out. That nature is a great and harmonious whole was known long before the philosophers of the eighteenth century began to speculate concerning her operations. A hundred and fifty years before, one Francis Bacon, enlarging upon an idea which was familiar enough to the students of the Flatonic philosophy, had worked upon these lines, and it is impossible to think the theories of develop

ment and evolution, as propounded in the passages quoted above, either a legitimate deduction from or a worthy completion of the Baconian idea. In these speculative matters, as in the practical work of his profession, it is to be feared that Erasmus Darwin must be pronounced an empiric after all. The present generation can only judge him by his books, and it must be admitted that they do not afford the reader a very high idea of his genius as a physician. He is, it is true, accredited with many wonderful cures. He jumped into celebrity, for example, at Lichfield, by the treatment of one Mr. Ings, who had been given over as dying by the local practitioner. Darwin reversed the treatment and saved the patient. Another case was that of a lady who was suffering from internal hæmorrhage. It is related by Miss Seward with a very circumstantial account of her own offer to allow the doctor to take from her sufficient blood for the operation of transfusion. Darwin found that the London physicians had been treating her with stimulants-wine, brandy, and so forth

and keeping her upon the strongest food, in its most concentrated form, with the natural result of increasing the hemorrhage. He adopted a milk diet, with abstinence from wine and everything that was likely to set up inflammatory action, and he succeeded in effecting a cure.

The ulceration, from which the bleeding had arisen, had time to heal, and nature to reassert itself. For the rest his practice would seem to have been pretty much that of his contemporaries, though he was certainly in advance of the majority of them on questions of sanitary science, such as ventilation, drainage, and pure water. He appears to have even anticipated the modern practice with regard to the administration of stimulants in cases of fever, but his remedies seem to the non-professional reader of "Zoonomia" somewhat startling in their severity. He was a great believer in the value of bleeding, and his lancet was constantly in requisition. Even in his own case he used it repeatedly for the relief of angina pectoris a disease which would be treated by modern physicians with the strongest stimulants. Miss Seward gives a long and circumstantial account

of the manner of his death, and of his personal appearance during the latter part of his life. Some of the details have been repudiated by his family, but sufficient is left unchallenged to prove that the frequent bleedings to which he had subjected himself had seriously injured his constitution. According to her story he was actually entreating his wife and daughter to bleed him at the very moment of his death. That part of the tale may fairly be dismissed as another example of Miss Seward's too fertile imagination. All that is necessary to record in this place is that he died somewhat suddenly, on the 18th of April, 1802, in his seventy-first year, at Breadsall Priory, near Derby, where he had been living during the last two years

of his life.

His wife placed over his tomb, in

AN interesting little volume just issued under the above title-perhaps the least original portion of its contents gives a clear sketch of the origin and succession of animals and plants on the earth from the days of the primeval organism, through all the phases of its progressive development, up to the reign of mammals and the advent of man. Its author, Principal Dawson, of Montreal, has already contributed several works of a similar nature, such as "The Origin of the World" and "The Story of the Earth and Man," etc., to popular geological literature. In the scientific world he is well known as the founder of a fourth great life period antecedent even to the ancient life epoch (Paleozoic), to which he has given the name of the Eozoic, or dawn period (eos, dawn, zoe, life), as signifying his belief that it contains the earliest records of life on the earth. To the geological era thus constituted he refers the Laurentian and Huronian series of deposits developed in such enormous masses in the region of his Canadian home. They are of especial interest as the oldest of the known sedimentary deposits,

The Chain of Life in Geological Time." By J. W. Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S. Svo. With numerous woodcuts. The Religious Tract Society.

Dr.

and occur in the form of low, rounded, ice-worn hills, "which have endured the battles and the storms of time longer than any other mountains." Dawson has made these highly crystalline rocks his special study, and has discovered the few traces of animal life therein, his most noteworthy addition being that famous "dawn animal,” Eozoon canadense, whose claims to animal organization are still the subject of such keen debate.

The aim of the present volume, which is profusely illustrated with a series of well-executed woodcuts, many of which are from original sources, is to place (to quote his own prefatorial words) before those who are not specialists in like matters "such a view of the ascertained sequence of the forms of life as may serve at once to give exalted and elevated views of the great plan of creation, and to prevent the deceptions of pseudo-scientists from doing their evil work." The plan adopted is to note the first known appearance of each leading type of life, and to follow its progress throughout all the ages up to the present time.

After a few preliminary observations as to the extent and sources of our exact knowledge with regard to the beginning of life on the earth, and references

to the various estimates as to the probable duration of geological time, the author makes the frank admission that science can tell us nothing as to how the first organism, whether plant or animal, or partaking of the nature of both, first came into being. Assuming that life was necessarily non-existent on the face of the earth during the most intense glowing and vaporous conditions of its earliest existence, he concludes that, in the first instance, there must have been "an absolute creation or origination of life and organization." Plants, he finds reason to believe, preceded animals, and our knowledge of the succession of life as revealed in the records of the rocks leads up to the conviction that the first creatures were of low and humble organization, suited to the then immature and unfinished condition of our planet. At that period, however, its physical condition was not favorable to the preservation of their remains in a determinable state.

Thus it is that the life records of the Eozoic period are so imperfect, for it is considered probable from the fact that great stores of carbon and of lime available for the use of such simple animals as were constituted to flourish under such conditions occur in the Eozoic rocks, that animal life was in reality more abundant during those ages than the scanty fossil traces of it would lead us to suppose. Here the famous Eozoon canadense appears upon the scene, and its claims to be considered an animal are strongly insisted upon by its sponsor and dscoverer. For Dr. Dawson has always maintained that this singular structure is the fossilized skeleton of masses of one of the lowest forms of life, the Foraminifera, or pore-bearing animals. In tracing this simple form of primeval life through the successive geological periods, Dr. Dawson finds its relatives or descendants up to the present time, but is not able to adduce any evidence with regard to the development of higher forms of animial life from Eozoon, because "he knows nothing of it." He notes, however, that "it has never perished, but has always found abundant place for itself, however pressed by physical changes, and by the introduction of higher beings."

Passing on to the age of the inverte

brates of the sea, the now comparatively rich Cambrian and Silurian fauna, the seaweeds, sponges, worms, moss animals, crustaceans, and mollusks, which exclusively populated the waters during the earlier Palæozoic period, is described, and the close affinity which many of them present to allied species in the existing seas clearly detailed. Thus the earliest known sponge (Protospongia fenestrata, Salter), from the Cambrian is shown to possess the same perfect type of skeletal development as the Lattice sponges of our own times. These primeval sponges, it is further insisted, betray no relationship with the Foraminifera below or the corals above them in zoological gradation. Coming next to the Mollusca, we find the views of Mr. Davidson on the Brachiopoda, and those of M. Barrande † on the Cephalopoda, with which our readers are already familiar, extensively quoted, and the conclusions to be derived from the study of the chain of life in the ancient life period are thus summarized:

*

"The Palæozoic age of geology is thus emphatically an age of invertebrates of the sea. In this period they were dominant in the waters, and, until toward its close, almost without rivals. We shall find, however, that in the Upper Silurian fishes made their appearance, and in the Carboniferous amphibian reptiles, and that, before the close of the Palæozoic, vertebrate life in these forms had become predominant. We shall also see that, just as the leading groups of Mollusks and Crustaceans seem to have had no ancestors, so it is with the groups of Vertebrates which take their places. It is also interesting to observe that already in the Paleozoic all the types of invertebrate marine life were as fully represented as at present, and that this swarming marine life breaks upon us in successive waves as we proceed upward from the Cambrian. Thus the progress of life is not gradual, but intermittent, and consists in the sudden and rapid influx of new forms destined to increase and multiply in the place of those which are becoming effete and ready to vanish away or to sink to a

*See "Leisure Hour," 1877, p. 613. Ibid., 1878, p. 149.

lower place. Further, since the great waves of aquatic life roll in with each great subsidence of the land, a fact which coincides with their appearance in the limestones of the successive periods, it follows that it is not struggle for existence, but expansion under favorable circumstances and the opening up of new fields of migration that is favorable to the introduction of new species. The testimony of paleontology on this point in my judgment altogether subverts the prevalent theory of survival of the fit test,' and shows that the struggle for existence, so far from being a cause of development and improvement, has led only to decay and extinction, whereas the advent of new and favorable conditions, and the removal of severe competition, are the circumstances favorable to introduction of new and advanced species."

In treating of the "origin of plant life on the land," the author premises, and on this point he speaks with the voice of recognized authority, that no direct evidence in the form of organized plant remains from the Eozoic rocks is forthcoming, although the quantity of carbon in the graphitic zone of the Laurentian series can only be compared with that of certain productive coalfields, and suggests a vegetable derivation. In the Cambrian seaweeds abounded, but the first known semi-land plant is the Protannularia Harknessii, Nicholson, which lived in Cambrian times, when the Skiddaw slates were deposited, and is believed to be distantly allied to the mares'-tails of our swamps. Subsequent discoveries prove the existence in the Lower Silurian period of members of the three leading families of the inferior division of flowerless plants, some of the highest types of which-the club-mosses, mares'-tails, and ferns have therefore existed almost from the beginning. But it is in the Devonian, a partially lacustrine formation, that the earliest and most complete land flora is preserved. The forms of flowing plants then covering the earth were greatly increased during the moist and warm climate of the ensuing Carboniferous epoch-one truly of luxuriant vegetation.

But the Palæozoic flora was deficient in representatives of "nearly all nearly all that is characteristic of our modern

forests, whether in the ordinary Exogens, which predominate so greatly in the trees and shrubs of temperate climates, or in the palms and their allies which figure so conspicuously within the tropics. The few rare, and, to some extent, doubtful, representatives of these types scarcely deserve to be noted as exceptions. Had a botanist searched the Paleozoic forests for precursors of the future, he would probably have found only a few rare species, while he would have seen all around him the giant forms and peculiar and monotonous foliage of tribes now degraded in magnitude and structure, and of small account in the system of nature.

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It must not be supposed that the Palæozoic flora remained in undisturbed possession of the continents during the whole of that long period. In the successive subsidencies of the continental plateaux, in which the marine limestones were deposited, it was to a great extent swept away, or was restricted to limited insular areas, and these more especially in the far north, so that on re-elevation of the land it was always peopled with northern plants. Thus there were alternate restrictions and expansions of vegetation, and the latter were always signalized by the introduction of new species, for here, as elsewhere, it was not struggle, but opportunity, that favored improvement.

After this brief discussion on plant life, Dr. Dawson takes us back to the animal world, and relates the biography of the piscine race from the first appearance of the primeval and insignificant sharks and ganoids in late Silurian times to the culmination of the group in the Devonian, or "the reign of ganoids,' when monsters of that ilk were the tyrants of the waters. He notes the incoming of the double-breathing reptilian type, of which the existing mudfish is the degenerated descendant, and the subsequent replacement of both ganoid and dipnoid races in the mediæval age of geological history by the modern types of bony fishes.

Another chapter gives us the history of the primeval air-breathers, in the forms of insects, may-flies, and crickets, occurring associated with the remains of Devonian plants, and of the subsequent rapid increase of types-the spiders,