AN EXPOSITORY OUTLINE (continued 2)

Neither by chemistry nor galvanism can man, we apprehend, be more than instrumental and co-operative, not originally and independently creative. In almost every form of life, whether animal or vegetable, art can multiply varieties,—can train, direct—but cannot form new species. This is the mockery of science. With all its invention and resource, it cannot produce organic originals. It can rear a crab-apple into a golden-pippin, or wild sea-weed into a luxuriant cabbage; it can raise infinite varieties of roses, tulips, and pansies, but can create no new plant, fruit, or flower. Man can make a steam-engine, or a watch, but he cannot make a fly, a midge, or blade of grass. He is an ingenious compiler, but not a creator; and his powers of manufacture and conversion are restricted within narrow boundaries. He cannot wander far in the indulgence of his fancies without being recalled, and compelled to return to the first models set by the Great Architect. The further he strays from primitive types in the effort to improve, by crossing, cutting, and grafting, and proportionably less becomes the procreative force. Hybrids are notoriously sterile. Garden fruit is not permanent, and requires to be renewed from seed. The law seems universal in plants and animals, that the vital energy or germ is less forcible and prolific in the pampered and artificial, than in the natural and wild races.

HYPOTHESIS OF THE VITAL PRINCIPLE.

It is ascertained that the basis of all vegetable and animal substances consists in nucleated cells—that is, cells having granules within them. Nutriment is converted into these before being assimilated by the system. It has likewise been noted that the globules of the blood are reproduced by the expansion of contained granules; "they are, in short," says the Vestiges, "distinct organisms multiplied by the same fissiporous generation. So that all animated nature may be said to be based on this mode of origin; the fundamental form of organic being is a globule, having a new globule forming within itself, by which it is in time discharged, and which is again followed by another and another, in endless succession. It is of course obvious, that if these globules could be produced by any process from inorganic elements, we should be entitled to say that the fact of a transit from the inorganic to the organic had been witnessed." (p. 176.) "Globules," the author continues, "can be produced in albumen by electricity. If, therefore, these globules be identical with the cells which are now held to be reproductive, it might be said that the production of albumen by artificial means is the only step in the process wanting. This has not yet been effected." (p. 177.)

These are the advances towards generation by chemistry and electricity. The process, however, according to this detail, appears still far from complete. Albumen is to be produced "by artificial means;" and even then we should doubt entire success. Chemists have long commanded the power to resolve the seeds of animal and vegetable life into their elements; they have analysed them, and shown the exact weight and proportion of each constituent; but they never could put them together again, or, by any similar compound produce the primordial egg or organic germ, from which a living being would arise. A connecting link—a vital spark, or animating soul—is always wanting to complete the existence of the Prometheus of the laboratory. Mark, too, the "if," and the "might," in this most lame and impotent hypothesis:—"If, therefore, these globules be identical with the cells which are held to be reproductive, it might be said," &c. Globules can be easily produced; the passage of the electric fluid through water will produce aerial globules in rapid and expansive movement; boys can produce them with suds and a tobacco-pipe in rapid succession, each, for aught we know, containing a "granule" that multiplies by "fissiporous generation." But these are not organic globules, and the author has committed the great perversion in language or logic of confounding the organic globule of life with the inorganic globule of a chemist. His theory is more fanciful than that of LAMARCK, from whom it is derived, and who had, at least, his petit corps gelatineux to begin with—to commence weaving organic tissue from—but our author's organic globule is not so substantive a conception; and as he does not pretend to be able to produce even this by physical means, he has not made a single step in generation.

This we consider the least satisfactory and successful portion of the author's work. It assigns no intelligible cause for the origin of life—it only begs the question, by the substitution of one mystery for another. His law of DEVELOPMENT is of the same description,—without sense or significancy, unsupported by applicable facts, and is not so comprehensible a cause of vital changes as LAMARCK'S assigned progressive tendencies of animals to master the appliances essential to their wants.

ANIMAL AFFINITIES, INSTINCT, AND REASON.

The scheme of the Vestiges is uniformly and consistently worked out; all phenomena are resolved into gravitation and development—the first as the law of inorganic, the latter of organic matter. By the last, however, no new principle is revealed, only a new phrase devised, by the amplified application of which the author's entire system may be said to be begged rather than proved; since development is used in a sense implying an indefinite power of animate and inanimate creation; so that at last we make no new discovery, only grasp a new nomenclature.

But the author is always interesting, either by the novel display of facts or the ingenious concatenation of plausibilities. Consistently with his fundamental notion of animal transmutation, he tries to prove a family likeness or affinity from the humblest to the highest species. In this way he seeks to explain the marvel with respect to the huge bulk of many of the tertiary mammalia—the mammoth, mastadon, and megatherium; they were in immediate descent from the cetacea, or whale and dolphin tribe. (p. 267.) Again, human reason is considered no exclusive gift; it exists subordinately in the instinct of brutes, and is alleged to be nothing more than a mode of operation peculiar to the faculties in a humble state of endowment, or early stage of development. CUVIER and NEWTON are only intellectual expansions of a clown; and this notion is extended to moral obliquities, the wicked man being characterised as one "whose highest moral feelings are rudimental." (p. 358.) From a like principle the writer concurs with Dr. PRICHARD, that mankind may have had a common origin; that there exists no diversities of colour or osseous structure not referable to climatable or other plastic agencies influencing the development of the different races, commencing with the lowest, or Negro tribe, and ascending upward through the intermediate aboriginal American, Mongolian, and Malay, to the last and most perfect stage of the Caucasian type.

Into the verity of these conclusions we are not called upon to enter; they have been long in controversy, involve a great array of facts and inductive inferences, and we have only referred to them as corollaries or collaterals of the author's hypothetical fabric.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL TENDENCIES.

We have no charge of impiety to bring against the Vestiges. Final causes, or to express ourselves more intelligibly, a purpose in creation, is nowhere impugned. The Deity is not degraded by impersonification in the form and frailties of mortality, but everywhere the author reverently bows to that august and unsearchable name, acknowledges the grand and benevolent design—the admirable adaptation of every created thing to its end and place, and finally concludes in a strain of grateful and exulting Optimism, that we confess we have not fully arrived at—namely, that everything "is very good." (p. 387.) From this impression we have only one constructive drawback to notice in the author's mechanical but fanciful constitution of the universe, by which a special Providence in the government of the world seems to be dispensed with, and the Almighty is placed in the sinecure position of the Grand Elector of the Abbe SIEYES, with nothing to do. But no divine attribute is abscinded—no glory of Omnipotence dimmed—whether it pleases him to rule by direct interpositions of power, or his own pre-ordained eternal laws.

Still less can we detect in the speculative inquiries of the Vestiges conclusions hostile to the moral and social interests of the community. Men are formed to be what they are; vice and crime are the fruits of malorganization, and malorganization is the result of the unfavourable conditions in which the subject of it has been placed, prior or subsequent to birth. These are the author's leading metaphysical inculcations. They impose grave duties upon individuals and upon society, rightly understood and applied, but we cannot discern a hurtful tendency in them. They are useful knowledge, knowledge that it would be well for parents and rulers to master, by showing the importance of education, of favourable circumstances, and of good moral and physical training, for rearing happy, well-ordered, and virtuous members of the community. Supreme in intelligence, man, we firmly believe, is not less supremely blessed in the means of felicity, provided his real nature and position in the scheme of creation were understood, recognised, and carried out. He has his place, his office, and his destiny; he is no enigma but as an individual; "in the mass," as the author emphatically remarks, "he is a mathematical problem." His conduct is uniform and consistent; the result of known and ascertainable causes—causes calculable and predicable in their consequences, as the statistics of crime have incontestibly established.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS ON THE VESTIGES.

The heavens are wonderful, and the earth is wonderful, and man, who, by force of intellect, has sought to comprehend the immensity of one and unravel the formation of the other, is hardly less wonderful than either. Still the great mystery remains unriddled; our researches have brought us no nearer the beginning, and the first cause of all continues unapproachable and undefinable as ever. Instead of explaining physical creation, we begin with it; we take the existence of matter for granted, and its attributes for granted, and forthwith begin to fabricate a universe, without first ascertaining whence was matter, or whence the laws by which it is impressed, and has been governed in its evolutions.

Nature's greatest phenomena are the celestial spaces and the bodies that fill them; our own planet and its living occupants. Upon each of these, their commencement and subsequent vicissitudes, the Vestiges of Creation have propounded an hypothesis, but one mystery is only sought to be explained by another still more mysterious. For the fiat of a Creator chemical affinities and mechanical laws have been substituted, but aided by these the author has failed to produce a world such as we find it. Hence we are again driven upon the old tradition, the old sacred authority, that the world was created out of nothing; and this is as easy to comprehend as the solution of the Vestiges, that it sprang from that which is certainly next to nothing—a heated fog or universal fire-mist.

When the author deals with the facts of science he interests and instructs, but when he speculates he only amuses or perplexes, without advancing knowledge. His terse and luminous description of the astral firmament deeply impresses with the might and the magnitude of the vast design; but when he attempts to account for the elimination of suns and worlds, their formation and arrangement, we are struck by the puerile folly of his conjectural presumptions.

Descending from this august and glittering canopy to our own planet, we are not less astonished by the exhibition of the extraordinary revolutions it has undergone. Geology is the true historian of the earth. Conducted by the lights it affords, we see an eternity of ages has rolled before us; we discover a series of worlds rising through the depths of ocean from the central sphere of heat, amidst boiling floods and volcanic fires, each new platform of existence, that countless periods of time had been requisite to form, peopled with its own congenial forms of organic life, mostly commencing with the simpler, and ascending by almost imperceptible gradations to the higher and more complex structures of being. We are struck by the correspondence, by the pari passu development and formation of the earth's crust and organic existences, and we are apt hastily to conclude that a relation has subsisted between them, that contemporary changes have been cause and effect, and that the improvement of the earth produced the correlative improvement in animals and plants.

This forms the author's second questionable hypothesis; it is plausible, but false—repugnant to fact and correct observation. We have no credible evidence that species have changed, or are changeable by the utmost efforts of art or favouring conditions; all we can effect is to improve them within definite limits, but not alter their characteristic types; and we have certain proof that neither man nor the animal nearly next to him in organization, has changed either in habits, disposition, form, or osseus structure during the last 3,000 years. Resemblance is no proof of identity; and hence, though species run into each other by almost inappreciable shades of difference, it is no proof that they are derivative, or other than isolated and self-dependent creations. That they are such, and shall continue such, seems a fixed canon of Nature, who, apparently, has prescribed to each its circle of amendment and range, that like shall beget like—that nought organic shall exist without ancestral germ—and that the variety of species which constitutes the beauty and order of nature shall by no chance, contrivance, or mingling of races, be confounded.

Geological facts are in favour of this conclusion. They attest the appearance of new species, not their improvement. In each species a gradation of improvement, approximating from a lower to the next higher organism, is not perceptible; but each seems to have been made perfect at first, and most suited to the co-existent state of the earth. The earliest reptiles were not reptiles of inferior structure; nor the earliest fishes, birds, or beasts. They were adapted, as we now find them, to their precise sphere of existence, without progressive aptitude, preparatory to a higher and translated condition of being. Geology rather points to the extinction and degeneracy of species than their improvement; and the fossils of the old red sandstone, and of the carboniferous formation, attest a loftier and more magnificent creation of both marine and land products than any now subsisting.

For these and other reasons before adduced, we dismiss the hypothesis of animal transmutation as unproved and untenable. It pleases and satisfies superficial views, but confronted with the facts of nature, it vanishes like a baseless vision. Man is sui generis, sole and exclusive in organization, without pre-existing type or affinity to other species; and his alleged recent metamorphosis from a monkey, and his first and far more distant one from a snail or a tadpole, are paradoxes only worthy of idle debating clubs.

Having attempted to unfold the progression of species by his law of development, the author next essays to explain the commencement of the vital principle itself. But here, too, he must have a beginning, and his "organic globule" answers a similar purpose, in deducing the mystery of life, as his nuclei in the "nebular hypothesis." In both the perplexity and real difficulty is not solved or mastered, but evaded. But we have already remarked on the point, and shall only observe that when the author can elicit thought from inorganic matter, either by chemistry or galvanism, we shall think he has made a step in creation. Until then he does not advance, only deceives himself and readers by verbal subtleties and baseless suppositions.

Apart from its hypotheses, the Vestiges form a valuable and interesting work. It is the most complete, elaborate, and—with all its faults of detail, logic, and inference—the most scientific expositor of universal nature yet offered to the world. But its hypotheses are unwarranted, not inductively derived, and can have no hold on men of science, supported as they mostly are by fanciful analogies, facts misunderstood or misstated, and illustrations selected without discrimination or applicability. Theories do sometimes conduce to the discovery of truth, but are often obstructive; occupy the mind, like theological controversy, without advancing science; and are viewed with the same aversion by the philosopher that the political abstractions tendered to the multitude by the demagogue are viewed by the patriotic legislator.

The work, however, will live, and deserves to live. The temple of nature has been looked into, not profoundly, perhaps, nor always successfully; but in a fearless spirit, and with a highly-accomplished mind. Had the divine COSMOS been more fully dwelt upon and depicted—had the harmony, beauty, and beneficence of creation been more fully and exclusively displayed—we should have been more gratified; but we are thankful, in the main, for what we have received. An impulse has been given to popular inquiry, and a vast field for discussion opened, from which we can prospectively discern neither less love for man, nor reverence for God.

Who the author is we have no certain knowledge. It is not, we suspect, Lord KING, nor Lord THURLOW, nor Lady BYRON; but it may be the author of the Essay on the Formation of Opinions, and of the Principle of Representation. Mr. BAILEY, of Sheffield, though little known, possesses the fine reasoning powers, intellectual grasp, independence of research, abstract analysis, and attic style, that would qualify him to produce the Vestiges of Creation, though we never heard that he is a great natural philosopher. But, as just hinted, deep science is not evinced by the Vestiges, only an able, systematic, and tasteful arrangement of its distant and recent advances.