[page] 346

MR. DARWIN has prepared a second edition of his masterly work, The Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication, in which he has embodied the results of his continued researches, and of communications from correspondents, during the seven years which have elapsed since its first appearance. Mr. Darwin adopts the excellent plan of giving a table of the principal additions and corrections which he has made, from which it will be seen that it is only on some minor points of detail, which do not disturb his general conclusions, that he has anything to retract or modify. The chapters on Pangenesis and Inheritance have been partially remodelled. It is unnecessary to repeat what has before been said of the high merits of this work as a model of clear, precise, and delicately adjusted scientific statement, in which a vast body of scattered facts seem to take ordered shape, as if by natural crystallization. There is no straining or twisting of argument, but only a quiet, steady accumulation of suggestive observations. If, when the work was first published, there were any doubts as to the soundness of any parts of the evidence, these must now be removed by the seven year's sifting to which it has been subjected.