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Attest 13, 1853.] THE LEADER. 785
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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In Resuming Our Notice Of The Periodical...
nrdinary scientific writings , Its style is certainly of rare exceUencer but S because they are detestable , than because it is exquisite . Lucid m Satement , copious in varied knowledge , grave pious , andjentle in tone lhem * k unquestionably is ; but its success does not he there ; it might have had all these qualities in tenfold degree , and yet have borne no -tenth edition" on its title , page , had there not also been novelty and ffrandetir of conception - novelty to startle , grandeur to enlarge and fatisfv the intellectual longings of meditative minds . # , . .. . We hold the Vestiges to be in some minor respects ^ accurate an d in - ronrolete , botn in knowledge and in a right conception of the Development Hypothesis . It will be our task to indicate some of these points in the course of the present review ; but our readers must be fully jiware of the unhesitating admiration uniformly ^ expressed in this journal for the philo-« oT ) hic value of the Vestiges , and of our repeated defence of its doctrines . Had the author been among our readers , he would have made an exception in the following charge : —
« It has never had a single declared adherent—and nine editions have been sold Obloquy has been poured upon the nameless author from a score of sources —and his leading idea , in a subdued form , finds its way into hooks of science , and gives a direction to research . Professing adversaries write hooks m imitation of his , and , with the benefit of a few concessions to prejudice , contrive to obtain the avour denied to him . " Certainly the treatment the work has received from antagonists ^ has been the reverse of philosophical . On more than one occasion we have exposed the foolish haste and triumphant chuckle with which even cautious men have incautiously snatched at any semblance of a fact or argument supposed to overthrow the Vestiges ; and we quote with a chuckle on our side the quiet rebuke given to geologists so eager to disprove an invertebrate era : —
" Thus a great array of instances of fish in the Lower Silurians and lower portions of the Upper Silurians was made up , to the assumed confusion of the advocates of the development hypothesis . Mr . Miller penned an eloquent chapter on the subject , speculating on the size and character of the animals , and not failing to apologise for the tediou 3 ness to which he was condemned by his adherence to facts , he being in this respect at a great disadvantage in comparison with the ingenious theorist who has only a fancy picture to make up . " Will it ever be believed by the readers of Mr . Miller ' s ingenious book , that not one of the > facts' on which he is so fearful of being _ tedious , is a fact at all ? From ' ¦ a very competent authority , ' we learn that the seven species of fish from the-Wenlock Limestone , believed in by Professor Sedgwick , because he had ' seen' them ,
turn out to have been found in the debris of a quarry of that lock , where it is admitted they had most probably been dropped from the pocket of some workman who had obtained them in a neighbouring quarry of a higher formation ! The Onchus spine from the Bala Limestone had been entered by the government surveyors , as a fragment of fish , after only a ' cursory examination ; ' it proves to be , ' in reality , half the rostral shield of a trilobite ! ' « Its resemblance to an Onchus was due merely to its being broken in half and obscured by stone / In like manner , the spine from the Llandeillo flags , certified as such by ' one of the most cauto be
tious and practised geologists of the present age , ' has been declared nothing but a piece of ' a new genus of Asteroid Zoophyte , ' something lower in creation than even the Bala spine proved to be ! While these vexing discoveries have been in progress , Professor Phillips has withdrawn his authority from the remains in the Wenlock Shale , and the low position assigned to the American specimen by Mr . Miller has not been sustained . In short , the whole of this chapter , which Mr . Miller feared would be tedious from its adherence to ' sober fact , ' ought to bo the most amusing ( and I am afraid it really is so ) in his whole book , seeing that it consists only of the purest fictions , the fictions of over-hasty science . at the
" In his fourth edition ( 1851 ) Mr . Miller inserts a note announcing th supposed ichthyic remains from the Bala Limestones have ' proved , on closer investigation , to be spurious / So much ho had then discovered . But coprolites had been found in that ancient group of rocks , bearing witness to tho existence of vertcbiata in those ancient seas . In reality , there have been only found , in the Llandeillo rocks , ' certain rounded black substances , ' which ' suggested the idea of coprolites , ' and in which a large proportion of phosphate of lime is detected . An inference from chemical science respecting an object standing so far out from tho region where there are any cognate facts to support it , will not of course go a great way with ordinary philosophers ; but such facts have a peculiar value for opponents of the development hypothesis , and wo may of courso expect to find this kept by them fully in view .
" Mr . Miller has not yet , however , exhausted his traces of vertobrato life in tho Lower Silurians . ' The coursq of discovery / says he , ' has added greatly more to tho evidence previously accumulated against tho Lainarckian than it has withdrawn . The track of a quadruped lias recently been found imprinted on a Lower S ilurian ( sandstone in North America / " It is very unfortunate for evidence of this , kind , that it in only added to be immediately after withdrawn . Tho Canada nlalia with ehelonian tracks reigned for a time in 1 . 851 . Professor Owen , when he hud seen only a few , gave his opinion that tho peculiarities ' pointed to tho Keptilia , ' and ho ' inclined to refer tho in to a
Hpocies of Terrapene or ICmydian Tortoise / The President of the Geological Society gave his counteuanco to this idea in his annual address of that year . To find that not merely fish , but reptiles , had lived coevally with tho hitherto supposed protozoic inolluslcs and trilobitcs , waH a discovery oven exceeding tho wishes of such men as Mr . Milieu . More slabs , howover , catno to lfrigland ; some whispers of doubt began to circulate ; and the learned Huntorian Professor wns induced in Hpring 1852 , to givo the whole mibjoot a new and more searching investigation . Tile result , appears in a most ingenious and laborious paper , presented , with many excellent illustrations , in tho Quarterly Journal of tho Geological Society . Mr . Owen there arrives at tho conclusion that the foot-tracks are not cholonian , but
crustacean , thus leaving that early ago still invertebrate . " Lei ; us also ronmrk on tho insolent assumption that tho author of tho Vestiges in noi ; worth hearing , because ho i « a more " dabbler , " whose facts are . not to ho trusted to , whose theories arc " dreams . " We call this insolent , because it is an assumption in defiance of the clearest evidence to tho contrary , and in made by men who aro themselves quite us much open to the charge . To take even tho example which will toll the lenst in our favour s what i » Professor Boduwick but a " dabbler" in
embryology , and a very shallow dabbler , too ? Yet , in his own department , he is an authority ; and if he is open to the charge , what shall we say to the hundreds strong in wo department who attempt to throw discredit on the facts used in the Vestiges , because the author is a dabbler , although the facts are those countenanced by the very highest authorities in each department . * To say that these authorities repudiate the use made of the facts , and declare them not to signify what they are made to signify in the Vestiges , is throwing no discredit on the facts , it is only removing the discussion from the ground of facts to that of philosophy—ground , by the way , on which men of science are frequently children . ¦
It is important , however , that the general reader should understand that , in spite of the violent language of Sedgwick and others , the facts on which the Vestiges is mainly founded , are those sanctioned by the greatest names in science . To call the inferences deduced therefrom by the author in the elaboration of his "hypothesis , " ( he calls it nothing more , ) by the contemptuous name of " dreams , " may be a compendious way of refuting them , but will not be greatly satisfying to sincere inquirers . , So much for " inaccuracy . " Further , let it be noted , that the author has been willing enough to retract some statements , and modify others , when the suffffested corrections were correct ; but these corrections have
in no degree altered the hypothesis , for that hypothesis was not dependent upon one fact , but upon a million , so that one more or less left it undisturbed—a point opponents have overlooked . Indeed , one may say of the " blunders" so complacently noted , what may be said of the general scope of the arguments employed against the Hypothesis—just as men of science overlook the broad , massive demonstrations of cumulated facts , because of some few apparent exceptions and inconsistencies , so do critics overlook the great coercive arguments of the . Vestiges because a fact here or an illustration there may be misstated or misapplied . Then as to " shallowness : " if some acquaintance with the writings of philosophers confessedly profound entitles us to pronounce on . such a question , we should say no charge is more frivolous . than that , lhe Vestiges strikes us as being a piece of co-ordinated thinking very remarkable among modern books , considering it with reference to the homogeneity and integrity of the speculations withtiie adduced facts . As the
author justly says : — - "To be a superficial book , it has been remarkably hard to understand . It lias also appeared that they were only able tp make up a show of . objection-to- the scientific data on which the work is founded , by misrepresenting these data , by ignoring all the highest authorities , and by clutching at immature announcements which turned out to be fictions . It has been shown that the propositions of the work , which they misunderstood or misrepresented , arc-in reality admitted or maintained by themselves . From their own writings it has been possible to collect those proofs of progressive organization , the existence of which they denied . It has been shown that they do not know the tendency of the facts of their own Bciences , and blunder whenever t hey attempt to reason upon them : —Professor Sedffwick , for example , corroborating at one place all the great truths which ho has contradicted at another , and only truly contradicting and condemning
himself /' There is no discovery in it ; there is no fathom-line cast into the depths of thought ; there is little strictly original in the ideas ; but there is an original bringing together of widely-scattered facts and ideas ; there is that originality which consists in thinking out to their conclusions the premises derived from others . If compared with Humboldt s muchlauded chaos , named Cosmos , its philosophic superiority will be as evident as its inferiority in scientific acquirement . two to it
We said the Vestiges had novelty and grandeur— wings carry victorious through the storm of polemics . Had it been a vamped up reproduction of Do Maillot and Lamarck ( as is fluently asserted by those who never read Lamarck and never saw Do Maillet s book ); it it had been as " inaccurate" and " shallow" as incompetent adversaries desire us to believe , it would never have survived bo much " refutation and so much scorn . But it is novel ; and the novelty consists in linking on tho hypothesis of Laplace to a modification of the hypothesis ot . Lamarck , and thus bringing the phenomena of the inorganic and organic worlds under one magnificent generalization of progressive development : — but it seemed to him to proceed
" Ho had heard of tho hypothesis of Lamarck ; upon a vicious circle , and lie dismissed it as wholly inadequate to account for tho existence of the animated species . He was not acqmuntcd . with the works ot St . Hilairc , but through such treatises on physiology as had fallen in his way , lie was awaro of some of tho transcendental views of th-. it science entertained both m Franco and England . With the aid of these , in conjunction with some knowledge of the succession of fossils in the series of rock-formations , he applied hnnseli to the task of elucidating the Great Mystery , as it was frequently termed by men ot science . Ho did not do ho—as far as he knows himself , —in an irreverent spint , or with ii hostile design to any form of faith or code of morals . Ho viewed tho inquiry as simply philosophical , anil felt assured that our conception of fclio divine Autiior of Nature could never bo truly injured by any additional nis . ght wo miglit ,
gain into His works and ways . . . , Before concluding , we must call attention to one point which has biuprisocl us in the history of his labours , lie perceived clearly all o outset that Embryology furnishes the real clue to the whole mysteiy and yet , strange to say , ho hn . s bestowed far lc » s attention on it than on Natural History and fccoloffy . It may not be within Ins reach to study that fascinating science ¦ dvtoctly ; ' but indirectly , from many works , ho might have mastered ascertained results . He should have learned anatomy to master them . Is it too late to direct his attention to tho worlca of Von Baer , ttathkd , Tiodomann . MuHor , Valentin , . 1 J ™ ho " ' amons Germans ; and Sorros , GooflVoy and Isidore bt . Jlilaire , Costo , Velpeau , and Martin do St . Ango , araonff !« ronehmcn , not lo mention English works ? With a little preliminary anatomy , ho would find a rich and fruitful crop of results in moab of these works ; Bueh as would give greater depth and certainty to his views . In our next wo shall enter into an investigation of those viows .
Attest 13, 1853.] The Leader. 785
Attest 13 , 1853 . ] THE LEADER . 785
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), Aug. 13, 1853, page 17, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_13081853/page/17/
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