[page] 1

The Latest Contributions to the Development Theory.

Mr. Darwin's new work on the Descent of Man waited many months in the hands of the English publishers, we are told, for the close of the Franco-Prussian war, in order that the public mind might not be diverted from giving it the attention its importance demands. That precaution might be necessary in England, but we do not believe that D. Appleton & Co., the author's American publishers, would have found it necessary here. There is among the more intelligent reading people on this side of the Atlantic a marked tendency toward the perusal of works containing the results of the latest investigations of the physical philosophers and biologists. Huxley, Tyndall Tyell [Lyell] and especially Darwin share the popularity of the novelists in our circulating libraries. Those who are curious in such matters may find it interesting to observe that in our own public library the copy of Darwin's Origin of Species is as worn, soiled and dog-eared as the most popular works of fiction.

Darwin's great popularity not only insures a large sale for his own works, which he keeps within very reasonable bounds, but gives currency to the efforts of his multitude of disciples, commentators and opponents. St. George Mivart, whose Genesis of Species has lately been republished by D. Appleton & Co., will probably be counted in the last category, but the author of this acute treatise does not go father than to discredit the pure Darwinian hypothesis, while he is as earnest a supporter of the development theory as Mr. Huxley or Mr. Wallace. He shows by a course of reasoning so ingenious as to establish his position as a close thinker and a forcible writer that there are a large number of facts in relation to the development of species from preexisting forms that cannot be accounted for by "natural selection," the "struggle for life" and "the survival of the strongest" which have much efficacy in Darwin's scheme. For instance, Mr. Mivart finds it impossible to account by natural selection for the preservation and transmission to offspring of insipient useful structures. At that stage such structures are functionless and useless, giving their possessors no superiority over the rest of their class and no advantage in "the struggle for life." He finds that the hypothesis of Darwin is also deficient in its ability to account for the co-existence of closely similar structures of diverse origin, for the sudden development of specific differences, for the definite limits to the variability of species, for the absence of transitional fossil forms, for the facts of geographical distribution, &c. On the whole this work is perhaps the one of all others that best deserves attention and refutation at the hands of the upholders of natural selection.

The two volumes of Darwin's Descent of Man with Mr. Mivart's one volume to which we have just referred, give the intelligent reader a clear notion of what may be said in support or in criticism of a scientific theory that hardly had an existence ten years ago when the world was startled by the publication of the origin of Species, and which is not almost as well established as the Copernican theory of the universe. The idle conjecture that the development theory gives man the ape for an ancestor still gives great opportunity for humorists to ply their vocation, but it has long since ceased to be regarded with levity by scientific men.

Among the most remarkable changes that have taken place with reference to the development theory since it was first broached is in the attitude of the religious world toward it. The crude notion that the overthrow of Deity is involved in the discovery that his method of operation is different from what was formerly supposed is well nigh obsolete. So distinguished a churchman as Charles Kingsley, better known as the author of Alton Locke than as "Canon Kingsley," has recently given public utterance to his acknowledgement of the futility of religious opposition to scientific doctrines that do not necessarily militate against the dogmas of the church or the truths of the natural or revealed religion. In this he but follows the example of the great mass of the clergy who have by ignoring the system given a tacit assent to its theological soundness.