Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/115

 organizations, ultimately owe their forms and their functions to the apparently same material; and, lastly, the fact that all specific organisms spring from minute specks of this substance, which specks therefore contain and transmit the vital record of billions on billions of hereditary qualities, specific and individual—these things show that the term protoplasm must be considered as merely a general term for all living matter, the constitution of which may perhaps in some cases be comparatively simple, while in others it must be immensely complex, the only common feature of protoplasmic material being that its constitution is too minute for the microscope to analyze. But even if we suppose that the constitution of the simplest form of existing protoplasm—whatever that may be—is as simple as we choose to suppose, it must at least be enormously complex as compared with any known form of non-living matter. Therefore an evolutionist, or a man who believes in the doctrine of gradual development in nature, is certainly not the man who would be prepared a priori to expect the spontaneous production of protoplasm within any period that it is competent for experiment to span. If experiment should ever succeed in unequivocally producing protoplasm by artificial means, the fact would, of course, be an immense gain to science, and by bridging the chasm between the physical and the vital would be also a gain to the doctrine of development. But the absence of any such experimental proof of continuity is no presumption against that doctrine, so long as the presumption remains that if the passage from the non-living to the living ever took place it must have taken place by slow degrees.

Passing over the reviewer's comments on the theories of Lamarck and the author of the "Vestiges," I shall at once proceed to examine the main portion of his review, which is simply an attempt at a criticism of Mr. Darwin's work. Here he says: "With the facts, our only concern is to understand them, that we may be able to reason from them. Our business is with the conclusions, to test their correctness in accordance with the recognized principles of right reasoning, that error may be eliminated and truth secured." We shall see that it can not well be said whether it is in understanding the facts, or in testing the conclusions, that this writer has shown himself the more deplorably incompetent.

First, he undertakes to expound and to criticise what he properly terms the distinctive "peculiarity" of Darwinism—the doctrine of natural selection. It may well be thought incredible that at the present day an educated man, writing in a respectable review on the subject of Darwinism, and introducing his criticism with all the solemn flourishes of pedantry that I have quoted, should at once proceed to show that he is entirely ignorant of what the doctrine of natural selection is. Yet such is the fact, and the heavy charge of uninstructed arrogance which I thus level at the writer in question is but too easily maintained by the following quotations (pp. 225-227):