Page:The Geologist, volume 5.djvu/146

122 is not a more marvellous phenomenon than ordinary reproduction; and M. Pouchet cannot conceive why it is regarded as such an extraordinary act. Nature is not abandoned to the disorder of chance; she is governed by harmonious Jaws, and each act which is accomplished in her depths is connected with the past and is lost in the future: each generation which appears is only the corollary of that which has preceded it (p. 461).

He goes on confidently to affirm that "the theory of the formation of the earth is not at present the subject of any doubt on the part of geologists. It is evident that our planet has been originally an incandescent mass, surrounded with an immense atmosphere of gas and vapour; and that, in cooling, it has endured all the physical or chemical conditions which necessarily resulted from its change of state."

His argument goes on to say, that certain parts of the globe having been upheaved at different periods, each has separately originated a fauna peculiar to itself, the degree of perfection of which is in the ratio of the antiquity of the continent supporting it. Thus, the inferiority of the Australian men arises, according to M. Pouchet, from the Australian continent having been upheaved later than the other parts of the world, and the men consequently being more modern, have not yet reached their summit of development, like the old races of Europe and Asia. The same argument applies to the marsupials of Australia, who are, so to speak, the embryo forms of the placental mammalia of the Old and New Worlds. This theory is almost the reverse of that adopted by many geologists, who speak of Australia as being a "belated" portion of the earth's surface, isolated from the rest of the world at an early period, and bearing the emblems of a bygone Fauna of Cestracions and Trigoniæ, analogous to those of the old Oolitic period.

Our readers will have seen that it is rather as a Biologist than as a Geologist that M. Pouchet has a chance of securing disciples in England. Turning however to his researches on the means of production of animals from inorganic matter (heterogenesis), his facts and arguments seem insurmountable. We confess ourselves unable to detect any flaw in the chain of testimony which he brings forward, and regret that the nature of this periodical precludes us from offering some of his experiments in detail. All the objections which were made by previous writers have been disposed of by M. Pouchet. The animals produced belong to the lowest forms of Acrita, and the flaws in the experiments of Schultze and Crosse have been carefully obviated.