[page] 1333

In biology, the publication of Mr. Darwin's new book will the greatest event of the month. The celebrated philosopher, in, his seventy-second year, seems as vigorous as ever, and in his calm, undogmatic, modest way of putting his theories presents a marked contrast to some of his self sufficient pupils, who treat as the ravings of a lunatic the slightest objections to any of their crude hypotheses. The kernel of his last treatise is that the distinction between the lower animals and the higher plants is not nearly so salient as had until recently been believed, although the boundary lines have been rapidly breaking down under the assaults of modern chemistry and microscopy. He furnishes a vast series of fresh observations on the " circumnutation" of leaves, stems, and rootlets, in addition to compiling numerous others from published works, and shows that every part of a growing plant is continually moving, describing slowly and imperceptibly narrow circles or ellipses, which he has been able to portray by means of the lines which a glass thread attached to ends of the circumnutating organs describes on sheets of smoked glass. The ultimate cells of the tip of a young rootlet are especially sensitive—so sensitive indeed to moisture, light, hard or soft objects and other physical and meteorological. surroundings, that Mr. Darwin compares them to the brain of animals of the "intelligence" of the delicate organ, and of the almost human power of adapting itself to circumstances in order to profit by them, which the leaf displays. There is little Darwinian in the book, unless it be the demonstration that there is such a thing as teleology, which is not a favourite view of the evolutionists. However, Mr. Darwin is like Jack Wilkes, who told the King that he was "not a Wilkesite." He is not much of a Darwinian, in the sense which his indiscreet followers would misrepresent him to be.