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Show 88 JJARWINIANA. be believed that the perusal of the new book " On the Origin of Species by Means. of ~ atu~·al Se~ection" left an uncomfortable impresswn, In spite of Its plausible and winning ways. We were not wholly unprepared for it, as many o~ our ·c?nt~mpor~ries s~em to have been. The scientific reading 1n whwh we mdulge as a relaxation from severer studies had raised dim forebodings. Investigations about the succession of species in time; and their actual geographical distribution over the earth's surface, were leading up from all sides and in various ways to the question of their ori()'in. Now and then we encountered a sentence, B . • like Prof. Owen's "axiom of the contmuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things," which haunted us like an apparition. For, dim as our conception must needs be as to what such oracular and grandiloquent phrases might really mean, we felt confident that they presaged no good to old beliefs. Foreseeing, yet deprecating, the coming time of trouble, we still hoped that, with some repairs and makeshifts, the old views might last out our days. .Apres nous le deluge. Still, not to lag behind the rest of the world, we read the book in which the new theory is· promulgated. We took it up, like our neighbors, and, as was natural, in a somewhat captious frame of mind. Well, we found no cause of quarrel with the first chapter. Here the author takes us directly to the barn-yard and the kitchen-garden. Like an hono~able rural member of our General Court, who sat s1lent until, near the close of a long session, a bill requiring all swine at large to wear pokes was introduced, when NATURAL SELECTION, ETC. 89 he claimed the privilege of addressing the house, . on the proper ground that he had been "brought up among the pigs, and knew all about them '>...,......so we were brought up among cows and cabbages; and the lowing of cattle, the cackle of hens, and the cooing of pigeons, were sounds native and pleasant to our ears. So "Variation under Domestication" dealt With familiar subjects in a natural way, and gently introduced" Variation under Nature," which seemed likely enough. Then follows "Struggle for Existence "-a principle which we experimentally know to be true and cogent-bringing the comfortable assurance, that man, even upon Leviathan Hobbes's theory of society, is no worse than the rest of creation, since all Nature is at war, one species with another, and the nearer kindred the more internecine-bringing in thousandfold confirmation and extension of the Malthusian doctrine that population tends :far to outrun means of subsistence throughout the animal and vegetable world, and has to be kept down by sharp preventive checks; so that not more than one of a hundred or a thousand of the individuals whose existence is so wonderfully and so sedulously provided for ever comes to anything, under ordinary circumstances ; so the lucky and the strong must prevail, and the weaker and ill-fav6red must perish ; and then follows, as naturally as one sheep follows another, the chapter on "Natural Selection," Darwin's cheval de bataille, which is ve!y much the Napoleonic doctrine that Providence favors the strongest battalions-that, since many more individuals are born than can possibly survive, those individuals and those variations which possess any advantage, however |