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has been, but precisely because we do not know that it may not have been! It is to dream, not to philosophise,—to talk in this way. It is just as if a man challenged us to believe that not only is Jupiter inhabited, but that it is inhabited by animals with three heads and fifteen hands, inasmuch as none can say that it may not be ; nay, because we do not know that it is not! Surely any rational creature would reply, "Until you know that it is, do not venture on any hypothesis on the subject. Do not make your very ignorance this 'you do not know'. the basis of pretended knowledge." I believe that, in spite of the boasted advance of science in our day, there never has been a period in which more rash hypotheses have been broached; or more at which Bacon would have stood aghast, to hear his name pleaded for them! But your young friend is an ardent admirer of the hypothesis of "development;" and I must tell you in another letter, if I can get time to scribble it to-morrow, the heads of our conversation.

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I promised to let you young friend, who, after reading the "Vestiges," has so violent a penchant for a simious ancestry.

I found it difficult, I promise you, to treat the subject with sufficient gravity. "Why," said he, with a half-defiant air, in reply to a little banter, "why should I not believe that at a remote period I might have had a monkey for my ancestor?"

I told him gravely, "That perhaps it might be difficult to say why he should not think so."

"But now, seriously," said he, "why may not a man have had such an origin?"

"Nay," said I, "I think the question is, not why a man may not have had such an origin, but why we are to believe he had ? If any man has a particular predilection for a monkey-ancestry, as you seem to have at present,—why, as a matter of taste merely, I have no objection in the world. I never quarrel about pedigrees -they are always ticklish subjects for discussion. If I went to see the good Welchman whose genealogical roll had, half way up it, the modest notice, 'About this time Adam was born,' and then went on, nobody knows how far beyond such a poor modern date, I should hardly have contested the point with him, but should have let him revel in his preadamite aps, as I do you in your preadamite apes, to the utmost bent of his pride of lineage. You merely go a few millions of generations further back-to your great πάππος, the monkey, and your more venerable πρόπαππος, the tadpole. Pray please yourself, if it is to be a matter of taste; but if you insist upon it, that it is reasonable for you to affirm such an origin, and that I, too, am a member of your family, I beg to ask why you say so? You must not tell me that you know no reason why man may not have been thus gloriously descended; you must tell me why you think he was. You acknowledge, do you not, that we now see nothing, that authentic history records nothing, ― of those transmutations of species of which you talk so glibly? On the contrary, the lines of demarcation, so far as we can judge, are strictly kept between species and species; and the one has no more tendency to pass into the other, than 'grapes to grow on thorns,' or 'figs on thistles.' What right have you to -nay, even to conjecture, that the peculiar fruit called man ' has grown on your tadpole-tree?"

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"Nay," said he, half laughing at this way of representing the matter, and yet half angry too,—“ though I grant that we see no such transformations now, how do we know what time,-thirty, or forty, or a hundred millions of years

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"Pray take your time," said I, smiling, "ad libitum ;-it is all at your disposal; you can suppose as long periods as you please; I am quite willing to say I cannot contradict you."

"Well, then, say in a million million billion of ages," he went on, rather warmly. "How do we know, in that time, what might not have taken place?"

I could not forbear laughing outright. "My dear fellow," said I, "it is, I fancy, of no use to ask what may not have happened in a period of time which you do not know, under the operation of causes of which you know nothing? Only, if you ask me to receive, as in the remotest degree a probable conclusion, your notion of the transmutation of species, be pleased to give me your reasons. If you dream-dream; if you philosophise-philosophise. But pray don't call this style of inference Baconian ' induction.' You will certainly make the great philosopher cry out against you from his Novum Organum' there, on the shelves behind you. You have evidently never read a line of him, or to no purpose. 'Is it from me, young gentleman,' he will say, 'that you pretend to have learned to talk in this fashion? Did I ever teach you to assign as a reason for believing in a fact, or in the faintest probability of a fact, that you do not know something ;that you do not know what might not have been done in a time you do not know, by causes which, equally, you do not know?' Come, tell me your true reasons for saying, or guessing, or believing anything in the matter; for this sort of reasoning' really will not do even among plain people like myself, much less among

philosophers."

"Well," said he, "the theory of development,' fully carried out, requires it."

"Aye," said I; "but what requires your indefinite gratuitous application of the theory of development? Why are we to extend it to phenomena of which we can only say,- Who can tell what unknown processes, certain unknown causes may have operated through unknown periods of time?"

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Why," he replied, "you surely do not deny that the theory of 'development' of the material world out of prior sta tes, and

those out of still prior ones, is made out pretty well; at least, as regards the successive geological strata which compose the earth's crust?"

"Aye," said I; "now you are coming to something. Yes; I believe as much as you do in such phenomena of development.' But see how much more logically and equitably I act in the argument than you."

"How so?"

"Ask me," said I, "why I believe in the gradual development of the geological formations."

"I ask you," said he.

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"It is not, then," said I, "that I do not know what unknown agencies, operating during unknown millions of years, may have done; my conclusion is not something for which I can bring forward no facts; but because the facts on which I found the opinion are patent and obvious. Physical causes, well known, and in operation now, though I pretend not to know the varying intensities with which they may, perchance, have operated at remote periods,- are slowly producing similar results before our eyes; the stages of the phenomena in the past may be distinctly traced the geologist tells me of his conclusions, and also of the grounds of them, so far as his science is a science of induction; and, what is more, my eyes, and not my fancy, corroborate his observations. These observations show that there have been successive conditions of the earth's crust ;- that in the later strata there are fossil remains of organic life;-that the still visible phenomena—the still legible hieroglyphics of their life and its conditions-attest a beautiful adaptation of the earth at various periods to its tenants, and a gradual preparation for the appearance of man. Thus much observation tells me; but what has all that to do with the proofs of 'fire-mist' transformed into 'solid matter,' or tadpoles transmuted by various stages into rational bipeds?"

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I had a little further conversation with him on a fantastical notion he has formed, that there have been no "catastrophal changes," as he calls them, in the development of, at least, the

"inorganic" world. That development, founding on inferences from some modern writers, he has decreed must have proceeded according to a law of “continuous change." I wrote him a short letter on the subject, a copy of which I will send you to-morrow. Yours,

My dear Friend,

LETTER CVII.

To the Same.

R. E. H. G.

1852.

I know not that your young acquaintance could point to any one passage of his favourite writers to justify, totidem verbis, his theory of "no catastrophes"; but he can certainly point to many which justify his inference that they ought to hold it.

He affirmed that whatever became of the theory of “continuous development," as applied to the organic world, he must believe it as applied to the inorganic. The letter in reply ran thus:

"Even as applied to the inorganic world, see in what gratuitous conclusions and flagrant contradictions your theory involves you. Gratuitous and contradictory I have already shown the theory of development of 'species' to be, if we are at all to trust that on which alone we can frame any philosophy, - I mean 'induction. All present facts and all past, so far as history tells us any thing. are against it; and all you can say for it, is that you do not know what may take place in fifty millions of years or so.

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"But I am anxious to show you that your crude notion of 'continuous development,' whether applied to the transmutation of species, to the evolution of organisms, or restricted to the processes of inorganic and inanimate nature, is also 'gratuitous in philosophy, and contradictory to fact. You say you cannot

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