Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/522

502 exist in the Divine Mind, whether realised or not materially and in the visible creation, of which the 'links do not pass by an easy transition' the one into the other, at least as beheld by us.

Dr. Asa Gray, an eminent American botanist, to whom we are indebted for a philosophical essay of great merit on the Origin of Species by Variation and Natural Selection, has well observed, when speaking of the axiom of Leibnitz, 'Natura non agit saltatim,' that nature secures her ends, and makes her distinctions, on the whole, manifest and real, but without any important breaks or long leaps. 'We need not wonder that gradations between species and varieties should occur, or that genera and other groups should not be absolutely limited, though they are represented to be so in our systems. The classifications of the naturalist define abruptly where nature more or less blends. Our systems are nothing if not definite.'

The same writer reminds us that 'plants and animals are so different, that the difficulty of the ordinary observer would be to find points of comparison, whereas, with the naturalist, it is all the other way. All the broad differences vanish one by one as we approach the lower confines of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and no absolute distinction whatever is now known between them.'

The author of an elaborate review of Darwin's 'Origin of Species,' himself an accomplished geologist, declares that if we embrace the doctrine of the 'continuous variation of all organic forms from the lowest to the highest, including man as the last link in the chain of being, there must have been a transition from the instinct of the brute to the noble mind of man; and in that case, 'where,' he 'asks,' are the missing links, and at what point of his progressive improvement did