In this small unpretending volume, we have found so many great results of knowledge and reflection, that we cannot too earnestly recommend it to the attention of thoughtful men.
It is the first attempt that has been made to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation —an attempt which presupposes learning extensive and various; but not the large and liberal wisdom, the profound and philosophical suggestions, the lofty spirit of beneficence, and the exquisite grace of manner, which make up the charm of this extraordinary book.
Let all be welcome who bring new truths, if so they can be proved. Let the confident hope animate us, that these new truths will in time be found harmonious with the old. Error is the only thing we need to be afraid of: it is useless to fear or to persecute in any other direction.
This is not the place for any detailed examination of the opinions set forth in the volume ; and in abstaining, we would not be understood to assent to all that it contains. But we will endeavour briefly to show its general drift and purpose.
It opens with a chapter on the arrangement and formation of the bodies of space, and on the wonderful relationships that exist between the constituents of our system. The result of the reasoning in this chapter would seem to be, that the formation of bodies in space is still and at present in progress, and that among the thousands of worlds suspended there in all stages of formation, there is evidence altogether apart from human traditions, for the probability of the comparative youth of oar system, as one whose various phenomena, physical and moral, as yet lie undeveloped, while myriads of others are fully fashioned and in complete arrangement. (1) The constituent materials of the earth, and the other bodies of space, are next considered, and from this there is a natural transition to the first formation and settlement of the earth.
We take one or two familiar illustrations from these early chapters, to show the simplicity of the writer's manner, and the beauty of his style:
The mind fails to form an exact notion of space so immense; but some faint idea of it may he obtained from the fact, that if the swiftest race horse ever known had begun to traverse it at fall speed at the time of the birth of Moses, he would only as yet have accomplished half his journey. Yet the distance of other known stars which do not belong to our system. Sirius for example, is seven times as great as this! And the elder Herschel computes distances beyond Sirius, thirty-five thousand times more remote than even that star! Observe, in connection with these immensities, the
The law which causes rotation in the single solar masses, is exactly the same which produces the familiar phenomenon of a small whirlpool or dimple on the surface of a stream. Such dimples are not always single. Upon the face of a river where there are contending currents, it may often be observed that two or more dimples are formed near each other, with more or less regularity. These fantastic eddies, which the musing poet will some times watch abstractedly for an hour, little thinking of the law which produces and connects them, are an illustration of the wonders of binary and ternary solar systems.
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The tear that falls from childhood's cheek is globular, through the efficacy of that law of mutual attraction of particles which makes the sun and planets round. The rapidity of Mercury is quicker than that of Saturn for the self-same reason that, when we wheel a ball round by a string, and make the string wind up round our fingers, the ball always flies quicker and quicker as the string is shortened. Two eddies in a stream, as has been stated, fall into a mutual revolution at the distance of a couple of inches, through the same cause which makes a pair of suns link in mutual revolution at a distance of millions of miles. There is, we might say, " sublime simplicity" in this grand indifference of the grand regulations to the vastness or minuteness of the field of their operations.
The formation of the earth in its various eras is happily described. We have the Era of the Primary Rocks, and the commencement of organic life—the era of the Old Red Sand stone, and of the Secondary Rocks. We have the formation of land, and the commencement of land animals, the Oolite Era, and the commencement of mammalia; and we have the various incidents which belong to the Cretaceous, Tertiary, and Superficial Formations. The geological revelations of the earth's wondrous history are thus succinctly laid before us; their narrative closing suddenly as man it about to enter upon the scene.
THE OLDEST LIVING CREATURES ON EARTH.
And what were these creatures ? It might well be with a kind of awe that the uninstructed inquirer would wait for an answer to this question. But nature is simpler than man's wit would make her, and be hold the interrogation only brings before us the unpretending forms of various zoophytes and polypes, together with a few single and double valved shellfish (mollucks) all of these creatures of the sea. It is rather surprising to find these before any vegetable forms, considering that vegetables appear to as as forming the necessary first link in the chain of nutrition; but it is probable that there were sea plants, and also some simpler forms of animal life before this period, although of too slight a substance to leave any fossil traces of their existence. The fact of the cosmical arrangements being an effect of natural cause, is a powerful argument for the organic being so likewise; for how can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds forth by the ample establishment of a natural principle flowing from his mind, was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence on one of these worlds! (2)
The hypothesis of the origin of life admitted, (as the result, not of the immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws, which are the expressions of his will) we proceed to that of the development of the vegetable and animal kingdoms. The general fact of an obvious gradation among the families of both vegetable and animal kingdoms, from the simplest up to the highest orders, is not disputed, we believe, by any inquirer. The author of this book, therefore, reasons from the examples that have led to this inference, for the fundamental unity, in one system (the whole creation of which must have depended upon one law or decree of the Almighty, though it did not come forth at one time,) of all the various organic forms of our world. He believes the whole train of animated beings to be a series of advances of the principle of development; he believes those advances to have been arranged from the first in the counsels of the Divine wisdom, as under necessary modifications gradually to take place, (a system foreshadowed by Plato.) and he lays down the first steps of advance, under favour of these peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of being to the next more complicated, " through the medium of the ordinary process of generation."
We cannot, within our limits, exhibit with any justice to the writer, his course of reasoning to this remarkable hypothesis. But we will give one or two examples of the more striking order of his facts:—
THE STAGE OF ORGANIC LIFE.
An insect, standing at the head of the articulated animals, is, in the larva state, a true annelid, or worst, the annalida, being the lowest in the same class. The embryo of a crab resembles the perfect animal of the inferior order of myriapoda, and passes through all the forms of transition which characterize the intermediate tribes of crustacea. The frog, for some time after its birth, is a fish with external gills, and other organs fitting it for an aquatic life, all of which are changed as it advances to maturity, and becomes a land animal. The mammifer only passes through still more stages, according to its higher place in the scale. Nor is man himself exempt from this law. His first form is that which is permanent in the animalcule. His organization gradually passes through conditions generally resembling a fish, a reptile, a bird, and the lower mammalia, before it attains its specific maturity. At one of the last stages of his foetal career, he exhibits an inter-maxillary bone, which is characteristic of the perfect ape; this is suppressed, and he may then be said to take leave of the semial type, and become a true human creature. Even, as we shall see, the varieties of his race are represented in the progressive development of an individual of the highest, before we see the adult Caucasian, the highest point yet attained in the animal scale.
Of these truths of physiology, strange as they may seem, there is no doubt. Each animal has been found to pass, in the course of its germinal history, through a series of changes resembling the permanent forms of the various orders of animals inferior to it in the scale. The changes indicated in the human being are in his brain and heart, which in their progress to complete formation are found to as some the various conditions of the insect, the fish, the reptile, the bird, and the lower mammalia. A difficulty remains, however, in what we see around us of the apparently invariable production of like by like. But the writer argues with great force that this can be held for no other than the ordinary procedure of nature in the time immediately passing before our eyes. He gives a remarkable suggestion, from some data of Mr. Babbage's calculating machine, that this ordinary procedure may be subordinate to a higher law which only permits it for a time, and in proper season interrupts and changes it.
The gestation of a single organism is but the work of a few days, weeks, or months; but the gestation (so to speak) of a whole creation is a matter probably involving enormous spaces of time. Suppose that an ephemeron, hovering over a pool for its one April day of life, were capable of observing the fry of the frog in the water below. In its aged afternoon, having seen no change upon them for such a long time, it would be little qualified to conceive that the external branchiæ of these creatures were to decay, and be replaced by internal lungs, that feet were to be developed, the tail erased, and the animal then to become a denizen of the land. Precisely such may be our difficulty in conceiving that any of the species which people our earth is capable of advancing by generation to a higher type of being. (3) During the whole time which we call the historical era, the limits of species have been, to ordinary observation, rigidly adhered to. But the historical era is, we know, only a small portion of the entire age of our globe. We do not know what may have happened during the ages which preceded its commencement, as we do not know what may happen in ages yet in the distant future. "It is fully established that a human family, tribe, or nation, is liable, in the course of generations, to be either advanced from a mean form to a higher one, or degraded from a higher to a lower, by the influence of the physical conditions in which it lives.
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Prominence of the jaws, a recession and diminution of the cranium, and an elongation and attenuation of the limbs, are peculiarities always produced by these miserable conditions, for they indicate an unequivocal retrogression towards the type of the lower animals. Thus we see Nature alike willing to go back and to go forward. Both effects are simply the results of the operation of the law of development in the generative system. Give good conditions, it advances; give bad ones, it recedes.
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Monstrosities are the result of nothing more than a failure of the power of development in the system of the mother, occasioned by weak health or misery."
The general result to which we are brought by the close of the investigation is, that the simplest and most primitive type of organic life, under a law to which that of like-production is subordinate, gave birth to the type next above it, that this again produced the next higher, and so on to the very highest. Applying this to the wonderful system of circular analogies and affinities in nature (of which Maclay is the author) it is found that the only appearance of imperfection, as though in this direction the laws of life were not yet accomplished, is in the circle to which man belongs. Doubtless the ideas which rise in consequence, are not a little startling.
" Is our race but the initial of the grand crowning type ? Are there yet to be species superior to us in organization, purer to us in feeling, more powerful in device and act, and who shall take a rule over us ? There is nothing improbable on other grounds. The present race, rude and impulsive as it is, is perhaps best adapted to the present state of things in the world ; but the external world goes though slow and gradual changes, which may leave in time a more serene field of existence. There may be then occasion for a nobler type of humanity, which shall complete the zoological circle of this planet, and realize some of the dreams of the purest spirits of the present race." (4)
The writer seems but little cognizant of the notions of the Greek philosophers, and it is the more strange to what an unconscious and large extent he has corroborated many of their most striking views. This idea of a higher race was held by Pythagoras, who connected it with that view of more consummate worlds in space, inhabited in their turn by beings more perfect and beautiful than those of earth, which we have, in an earlier part of this notice, seen to be in some sort sanctioned by the results of astronomical inquiry. Another idea of the philosopher of Samos may be said to form the basis on which the writer of this volume, unconsciously, has raised its whole philosophical structure. Pythagoras held the world to be an harmonical development of the First One, advancing from the less beautiful and good to the better and more beautiful.
When we have arrived at that stage of the inquiry by which we discover that there is a general adaptation of the mental constitution of man to the circumstances in which he lives, as between all the parts of nature to each other; —when we find that our physical constitution, like every thing else, is destined to be developed from inherent qualities, and to have a mode of action depending solely on its own organization, the inquiry seems complete. We have seen the masses of space formed by Law, and in due time made theatres of existence for plants and animals; we have seen in like manner developed and sustained in action by Law, sensation, disposition, intellect; and we have observed that in inorganic nature, the Law is Gravitation, and in organic, Development. But the question so inexpressibly interesting remains, of man's final condition on the earth in relation to Supra-Mundane things. It is the subject of the last chapter of the book. Its views may in certain points seem too 
material, but let them not be hastily judged. We might again resort
to the Greek philosophy for resemblances unheeded by the writer. The Socratic idea of science is, that nothing can be known except together with the rest and along with its relation to all things beside. And it would be hazardous to say that a nobler definition of philosophy has been or could be given, than that which declares it to consist not in a partial cultivation either of morals or physics, but in the co-existence and intercommunion of both.
(1.) If this theory be correct (and it is sustained by geology), where shall we look for the origin of the increase of materia, which the earth is (supposed by some to be) constantly receiving? It seems evident that the diameter of the earth is greater now than in the era of the primary rocks, or of the old red sandstone ; and it also seems constantly increasing. Monuments,upon mountain and plain, the basement of walls and tombs, all indicate an increase of materia upon the surface. In India, beyond the reach of alluvion or of washing from the hills, without the apology of enormous density to sink them into the earth, monuments have been exhumed several feet beneath the surface, restive upon their foundation stone, and bearing no marks of their having been disturbed for scores of centuries. This phenomena continually suggests the query, " From what source is this apparent increase derived ? —New York Communtitist.
(2) How, indeed ! The first difficulty I encountered in my early investigations, was, whether it required a special edict of the Deity to create a new variety, or was it produced under some unknown law of development? I saw sorrels growing upon certain soils, and refusing to grow upon others; yet when pumice had been strewed upon a field a few years brought sorrel is abundance. Was there any connection between the acid in the soil and in the sorrel? If not, why would sorrel grow upon no soil that was not reeking with acid ? When improvement had substituted lead pipe for hollow logs in laying aqueducts, men found that the pipe running through sorrel ridges was rapidly decomposed by some sharp acid. Here was the law, but did it reach far enough to form the sorrel without the seed, but with all the other conditions ? I have seen a sturdy growth of pitch pine destroyed by the autumnal fires, and a few years would cover that soil with a thick growth of bastard birch, interspersed occasionally with a tree, the like of which could not be found in a circuit of several miles. The birch refused to grow where the fire had not run, unless ashes had been moved on to the soil; and it was said that the sap of the birch contained an acid and an alkali, which made it a valuable medicine in the Indian pharmacology. Was there any law by which, under these apparent conditions, these birch and sorrel germs could be produced without seed ? I knew not then—I am not much wiser now. But I soon found that there was a law of Nature called development, through which these mighty changes were manifested; that they tended to a certain end; what was that end ? Here was the next difficulty. The only obstacle between me and atheism was, the mysterious principle of life. Was life an element apart from the forms through which it was manifested ? If so, then the immortality of the soul was a certain conclusion,—or the immortality of ideas, as taught by Plato; and there is but little difficulty in swallowing every other dogma of the church after this. But a few succeeding steps brought another difficulty, and sent the church to a bottomless abyss of scepticism. This was the unity, the individuality of the race, independent of the individuals composing it. Thus humanity represented a vast unit, being subjected by universal analogy to the conditions of birth, youth, maturity, decrepitude, and death. Life was an all-pervading element, developed under certain conditions, and being constantly under the coutroul of a law of development, as every fossil of races long since extinct assure us. Where is the origin of this mysterious element of life? " God!" replied the church. What is God ? asked Reason. To this there was no answer, of course, except in the words of the Westminster Catechism. What was the condition of the earth before organic life commenced up in it? The first vegetables were sea plants, and the first forms in animated nature substantial enough to leave any fossil traces of their existence, were a few species of coarse shell fish and polypes. Before this, all was rock and water. It is not improbable that a single crude species of sea-weed was the immediate progenitor of animated nature—that the plant begat the polypes, which is half vegetable and half animal,—and the varieties increased through a lapse of countless ages, the earth preparing by slow progressive steps for still higher forms of life. When vegetation had become a reproductive power, a spongy muscle attached to some rocks, appeared, and possessing apparent volition ; and for this advance, probably, thousands of years were required. Out of this mere fungus, at long intervals were developed shell fish with their numerous varieties, and in the long lapse of ages, Nature, through the same simple law, has rendered the earth what we now see it: and we, the ephemera of a day, have learned to look through the vista of a paltry forty centuries, and exclaim, " an unchanging fact!" But did the principle of life, as manifested in these zoophytes, exist before they existed ? If yea, then its creation was prior to theirs. If nay, then upon this planet, for the first time in eternity, was manifested the principle of life through organised matter. What a grudging thought to Nature ! In all infinity with its countless worlds, we possess the seat of the first ONE ! bah!— But this law of life ! if it had a creation, it is not eternal in the past. To suppose a creation, supposes volition, which implies pre-existing life in the creator. This creator must have had a creator, or he is self-existing. But matter now contains the principle of life ; does it inhere in matter ? Whence came matter ?—Either it was created, or it is eternal. If eternal, it possesses life and motion, gravitation and development inherently, or it does not. If it possesses them inherently, there is no room for God—if not, and matter be eternal, then there are two eternal, self-existing powers, which is proving too much. If God created matter out of his own essence, then matter is eternal, self-existent, is God. If he created it out of no thing, there was a time when there was nothing in existence but God ! Thus, all the matter in infinity was created out of nothing,— nothing at all, or it is co-existent with God, forming two infinities.—or matter is God, All in All.—Our author supposes the comparative youth of our planet. Undoubtedly, in its present condition it is still young. But does he suppose that for the first time in eternity it is inhabitable? At all events, the theory of development marked out by him would require but little less than eternity to mature; and in the result, we are again thrown back upon the old difficulty, —whether it is easier to believe matter with its present laws to be eternal and inseparable, or to believe in a self existent God from whom matter holds a precarious possession of the laws of gravitation and development.— New York Communitist.
(3) All this theory is justified by Nature in generation, and it has formed for me an irrefutable argument for the humanity of Negroes. (Strange to tell, there are whites who are so thoroughly stultified as to deny that negroes are human beings ! !)—The bare fact that under the degradation of slavery, other things being equal, that race retreated towards Baboonism, appeared to me an unerring indication that they were derived from the lower animal types, and the Caucasian variety from them. That race appears next in the ascending grade above the ourang-outang, and the other species of apes. It is a favourite notion of the Idealists', that man is a thought of the Deity personified, and that, as no thought of his can be purposeless, man's existence must be eternal as the purpose of his Creator. Tried by the views of this author, I should be pleased to learn where in the advance from the polypus to man does immortality commence ? This notion of commencing somewhere is as vague as the attempt to find the exact spot where the child learns to distinguish between good and evil so closely as to merit damnation: or where the degrees of responsibility begin and end from the idiot with each advancing degree of intelligence up to ordinary mental powers.— New York Communitist.
(4.) Here is thrown open a wide field of speculation, into which the mind rushes a willing pioneer. That we are but the fleeting predecessors of another and a higher race, the history of the past and the present demonstrates. The Caucasian is now the dominant variety, and the inferior races shrink before him. In the east, north, west, and south,—whether Hindoo, Chinese, African, or American, their identity is fast becoming merged in the last and highest branch. And thus it may be until the Caucasian, from his own loins, shall produce his superior, who will visit upon his head the woes of his present inferiors. How completely has the present race, in its voyage upon the stream of Time, verified this most thrilling conclusion ? Struggling from degradation, ignorance, imbecility, and childhood, through long and weary centuries of Development,—slowly forcing its way through the tangled bogs of fate, —displacing theories, dogmas, institutions, empires, in obedience to mighty law, yet knowing nothing of the impulse that prompted it to act, nor of the law to which it was blindly rendering homage and obedience.—it seems to have nearly reached the epoch which is to usher in that misty dream of ultimate happiness which it has preserved as the "Ark of the Covenant," through its toilsome pilgrimage. Is it not apparent that some grand results are about to be developed in the present crisis ? Invention and machinery have almost superseded muscular labour —intelligence is penetrating infinity far new and useful facts—the dreams of ancient sages are fast becoming a solid reality before our eyes— the inferior races are dwindling away before the Caucasian, who has obtained a foot hold upon every inhabitable inch of the globe—and every moral and physical movement seems calculated to prepare humanity for a sweeping change. This expectation has become a general, restless fever in all classes. Despots, patriots, and even politicians have begun to manifest a spirit towards humanity which their mole sighted compeers term infatuation. Old remedies for wrong and misfortune are scouted as the nostrums of political quacks, and a strange foreboding seizes the public mind at every new step, as though every step was the herald of that which they have to learn in the future —and while these events are shaking the moral world to its centre, a man appears upon the stage, whose transcendent intellect unfolds new laws for humanity, lays bare the past, the present, the future in one vast moral panorama, announces a system which provides for the gradual development of man until he shall remove mountains, scale the clouds, inhabit the elements, controul the climatology of the planet, and possess in alternate periods and without the loss of individual consciousness, the material and the spirit lands throughout an endless eternity.
The speculations which claim a strong affinity with the theory of this Englishman, amount to the following :—
Electricity is the combining element in matter—
The sun is the electric centre of the solar system—
Electricity imparted from the sun is the material by which the earth sustains her constant modifications—
The planets are originally thrown from the sun in a gaseous form, and their first orbits were eccentric, and their first revolutions round the sun were as comets—
The comets are new planets, undergoing a solidification of their gases, and as this solidification goes on, their orbits become less eccentric, they become planets, are inhabitable and inhabited—
Electricity is the vital fluid, the life-element, manifested under definite conditions—
The planets, emanating from the sun in a gaseous form, are solidified in space, are gradually drawn to the sun while this process is going on, and as their orbits decrease, their polarity changes—their approach to the sun increases their electric energy, and these modifications are accompanied by higher and still higher forms of life, until they are again absorbed in the sun, to be again thrown off as comets, and tread the same eternal round of change ; become planets, inhabited by such a race as this, destined to toil their way to elevation, perhaps, through the same path of ignorance and woe.
There is a stupendous Fatalism running through this theory, which crushes to powder like the merest mushrooms, the old theories of human freedom. Under this view of progress, freedom still means something, but compared to the old notion entertained of it under the irreconcileable theory of predestination, it is but a drop to an ocean. I could pursue this subject much farther, had I time, room, and patience. But we must wait the slow and toilsome delivery of new data, which will, in the distant future, unfold the mighty problem of the true destiny of humanity.— New York Communitist.
South Australian Register 22 November 1845,
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