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The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, by Charles Darwin, (D. Appleton & Co.) is a strikingly remarkable book, original in its conception, ingenious in its arguments, learned in its mastery of anatomical and physiological science, but in our opinion wholly unsatisfactory and unacceptable in its conclusions, because they rest wholly upon fanciful conjectures, even were they are not in direct antagonism to the teachings of the Bible.

The great object of Mr. Darwin is to prove that man is not an independent creation, but

the descendant of "some pre-existing form" of "some ancient, lower, and extinct form" and

from all the lights which Mr. Darwin has been able to collect, be seems to conclude that

we are descended from the ''anthropomorphous apes." He admits that we are a much higher

development than our remote progenitors, but nevertheless insists that we are of the apes

apey. Mr. Darwin assumes that we know nothing of the origin of man as a distinct order of

beings. We are fully satisfied with the knowledge given us in Genesis i. 26-30, which tells

us distinctly that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them;" and until Mr. Darwin can adduce some stronger proof to

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the contrary than any we have been able to find in the volumes before us, we intend to believe firmly in the Mosaic record, and to reject and utterly repudiate the anthropomorphous ape paternity, while, in politeness and consideration for Mr. Darwin, we leave him to attribute his own descent according to his peculiar fancy and to his own natural or unnatural "selection of species."

But though we do not believe a word of Mr. Darwin's theory, and condemn it utterly as irreligious, and grotesquely false from beginning to end, his book contains much to interest and amuse the reader, and presents many facts in natural history which are not generally known.