[From _The Quarterly Review_, July, 1860]
_On the Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection; or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life._ By CHARLES
DARWIN, M.A., F.R.S. London, 1860.
Any contribution to our Natural History literature from the pen of Mr.
C. Darwin is certain to command attention. His scientific attainments,
his insight and carefulness as an observer, blended with no scanty
measure of imaginative sagacity, and his clear and lively style, make
all his writings unusually attractive. His present volume on the _Origin
of Species_ is the result of many years of observation, thought, and
speculation; and is manifestly regarded by him as the "opus" upon which
his future fame is to rest. It is true that he announces it modestly
enough as the mere precursor of a mightier volume. But that volume is
only intended to supply the facts which are to support the completed
argument of the present essay. In this we have a specimen-collection of
the vast accumulation; and, working from these as the high analytical
mathematician may work from the admitted results of his conic sections,
he proceeds to deduce all the conclusions to which he wishes to conduct
his readers.
The essay is full of Mr. Darwin's characteristic excellences. It is a
most readable book; full of facts in natural history, old and new, of
his collecting and of his observing; and all of these are told in his
own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations,
and all sparkle with the colours of fancy and the lights of imagination.
It assumes, too, the grave proportions of a sustained argument upon a
matter of the deepest interest, not to naturalists only, or even to men
of science exclusively, but to every one who is interested in the
history of man and of the relations of nature around him to the history
and plan of creation.
With Mr. Darwin's "argument" we may say in the outset that we shall have
much and grave fault to find. But this does not make us the less
disposed to admire the singular excellences of his work; and we will
seek _in limine_ to give our readers a few examples of these. Here, for
instance, is a beautiful illustration of the wonderful interdependence
of nature--of the golden chain of unsuspected relations which bind
together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full
and most diversified earth. Who, as he listened to the musical hum of
the great humble-bees, or marked their ponderous flight from flower to
flower, and watched the unpacking of their trunks for their work of
suction, would have supposed that the multiplication or diminution of
their race, or the fruitfulness and sterility of the red clover, depend
as directly on the vigilance of our cats as do those of our well-guarded
game-preserves on the watching of our keepers? Yet this Mr. Darwin has
discovered to be literally the case:--
From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found that the
visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of
clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium
pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very
little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or
very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very
rare or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district
depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy
their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the
habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two-thirds of them are
thus destroyed all over England." Now the number of mice is largely
dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Mr. Newman
says, "near villages and small towns I have found the nests of
humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the
number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence, it is quite credible
that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district
might determine, through the intervention, first of mice, and then of
bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district.--p. 74.
* * * * *
Now, all this is, we think, really charming writing. We feel as we walk
abroad with Mr. Darwin very much as the favoured object of the attention
of the dervise must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his
eye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, and diamonds, and
emeralds, and topazes, and rubies, which were sparkling unregarded
beneath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes save those which the
dervise had enlightened. But here we are bound to say our pleasure
terminates; for, when we turn with Mr. Darwin to his "argument," we are
almost immediately at variance with him. It is as an "argument" that the
essay is put forward; as an argument we will test it.
We can perhaps best convey to our readers a clear view of Mr. Darwin's
chain of reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them,
first, the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them; next, the leading
propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final
inference; and then the mode by which he endeavours to support his
propositions.
The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all
the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is
now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state
in the great Earth-Museum around us, which the science of geology
unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of
descent from father to son,--"animals from at most four or five
progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number" (p. 484), as Mr.
Darwin at first somewhat diffidently suggests; or rather, as, growing
bolder when he has once pronounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to
us, from one single head:--
Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that ALL
ANIMALS and PLANTS have descended from some one prototype. But analogy
may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in
common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their
cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction....
Therefore I shall infer from analogy that probably all the organic
beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course
included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life
was first breathed by the Creator.--p. 484.
This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast,
creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct
descendants of some one individual _ens_, whose various progeny have
been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable
conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us.
This is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to
arrive at. To find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms, and
flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and
venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal
descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor, perhaps of the
nucleated cell of some primaeval fungus, which alone possessed the
distinguishing honour of being the "one primordial form into which life
was first breathed by the Creator "--this, to say the least of it, is no
common discovery--no very expected conclusion. But we are too loyal
pupils of inductive philosophy to start back from any conclusion by
reason of its strangeness. Newton's patient philosophy taught him to
find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of
the stars in their courses; and if Mr. Darwin can with the same
correctness of reasoning demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we
shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of
philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms,--
Claim kindred there, and have our claim allowed,
--only we shall ask leave to scrutinise carefully every step of the
argument which has such an ending, and demur if at any point of it we
are invited to substitute unlimited hypothesis for patient observation,
or the spasmodic fluttering flight of fancy for the severe conclusions
to which logical accuracy of reasoning has led the way.
Now, the main propositions by which Mr. Darwin's conclusion is attained
are these:--
1. That observed and admitted variations spring up in the course of
descents from a common progenitor.
2. That many of these variations tend to an improvement upon the parent
stock.
3. That, by a continued selection of these improved specimens as the
progenitors of future stock, its powers may be unlimitedly increased.
4. And, lastly, that there is in nature a power continually and
universally working out this selection, and so fixing and augmenting
these improvements.
Mr. Darwin's whole theory rests upon the truth of these propositions and
crumbles utterly away if only one of them fail him. These, therefore, we
must closely scrutinise. We will begin with the last in our series, both
because we think it the newest and the most ingenious part of Mr.
Darwin's whole argument, and also because, whilst we absolutely deny the
mode in which he seeks to apply the existence of the power to help him
in his argument, yet we think that he throws great and very interesting
light upon the fact that such self-acting power does actively and
continuously work in all creation around us.
Mr. Darwin finds then the disseminating and improving power, which he
needs to account for the development of new forms in nature, in the
principle of "Natural Selection," which is evolved in the strife for
room to live and flourish which is evermore maintained between
themselves by all living things. One of the most interesting parts of
Mr. Darwin's volume is that in which he establishes this law of natural
selection; we say establishes, because--repeating that we differ from
him totally in the limits which he would assign to its action--we have
no doubt of the existence or of the importance of the law itself.
* * * * *
We come then to these conclusions. All the facts presented to us in the
natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the
fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition
under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of
species; first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing
variations within the same species; secondly, from the fact that these
variations, though most serviceable for man, have no tendency to improve
the individual beyond the standard of his own specific type, and so to
afford matter, even if they were infinitely produced, for the supposed
power of natural selection on which to work; whilst all variations from
the mixture of species are barred by the inexorable law of hybrid
sterility. Further, the embalmed records of 3,000 years show that there
has been no beginning of transmutation in the species of our most
familiar domesticated animals; and beyond this, that in the countless
tribes of animal life around us, down to its lowest and most variable
species, no one has ever discovered a single instance of such
transmutation being now in prospect; no new organ has ever been known to
be developed--no new natural instinct to be formed--whilst, finally, in
the vast museum of departed animal life which the strata of the earth
imbed for our examination, whilst they contain far too complete a
representation of the past to be set aside as a mere imperfect record,
yet afford no one instance of any such change as having ever been in
progress, or give us anywhere the missing links of the assumed chain, or
the remains which would enable now existing variations, by gradual
approximations, to shade off into unity. On what then is the new theory
based? We say it with unfeigned regret, in dealing with such a man as
Mr. Darwin, on the merest hypothesis, supported by the most unbounded
assumptions. These are strong words, but we will give a few instances to
prove their truth:--
All physiologists admit that the swim-bladder is homologous or
"ideally similar" in position and structure with the lungs of the
higher vertebrate animals; hence there _seems to me to be no great
difficulty in believing_ that natural selection has actually converted
a swim-bladder into a lung, or organ used exclusively for
respiration.--p. 191.
_I can indeed hardly doubt_ that all vertebrate animals having true
lungs have descended by ordinary generation from the ancient
prototype, of which we know nothing, furnished with a floating
apparatus or swim-bladder--p. 191.