The peculiarities of the shapes of animals, which distinguished them from each other, he supposes to have been gradually formed by these same irritable fibres, and to have been varied by reproduction. As to the faculties of sensation, volition, and association, they come in afterwards as matters of course, and in a manner so easy and natural, that the only wonder is, what had kept them waiting so long. He mentions, with something like approbation, the hypothesis of Buffon and Helvetius, who, as he tells us, seem to imagine, that mankind arose from one family of monkeys, on the banks of the Mediterranean, who accidentally had learned to use the adductor pollicis, or that strong muscle which constitutes the ball of the thumb and draws the point of it to meet the points of the fingers, which common monkeys do not; and that this muscle gradually increased in size, strength and activity, in successive generations; and that, by this improved use of the sense of the touch, monkeys acquired clear ideas, and gradually became men.
To this he gravely adds, that perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of this terraqueous globe, and consonant of the dignity of the Creator.
His description of the way in which clear ideas were acquired is not much improved when he puts it into verse.
Nerved with fine touch above the bestial throngs,
The hand, first gift of Heaven! to man belongs:
Untipt with claws, the circling fingers close,
With rival points the bending thumbs oppose,
Trace the nice lines of form with sense refined,
And clear ideas charm the thinking mind.
Temple of Nature, c. 3.
He tells us of a naturalist who had found out a shorter cut to the production of animal life, who thought it not impossible that the first insects were the anthers and stigmas of flowers, which had by some means loosened themselves, from their parent plant, and that other insects in process of time had been formed from these; some acquiring wings, others fins, and others claws, from their ceaseless efforts to procure food, or to secure themselves from injury. What hindered but these insects might have acquired hands, and by those means clear ideas also, is not explained to us.
As great improvements, however, have certainly been made in some way or other, he sees reason to hope that not less important ameliorations may in time succeed. If our improved chemistry (says he,) should ever discover the art of making sugar from fossile or aerial matter, without the assistance of vegetation, food for animals would then become as plentiful as water, and they might live upon the earth without preying on each other, as thick as blades of grass, without restraint to their numbers but the want of local room: no very comfortable prospect, it must be owned, especially to those who are aware of the alarming ratio in which, according to later discoveries, population is found to multiply itself; a consummation that would scarcely produce that at which he thought it the chief duty of a philosopher to aim: namely, the greatest possible quantity of human happiness. On being made acquainted with reveries such as these, through the means of the press, we are inclined to doubt the justice of his encomium on the art of printing, since which discovery, he tells us, superstition has been much lessened by the reformation of religion; and necromancy, astrology, chiromancy, witchcraft, and vampyrism, have vanished from all classes of society; though some are still so weak in the present enlightened times as to believe in the prodigies of animal magnetism, and of metallic tractors. What then is to be said of the prodigies of spontaneous vitality? To a system which removes the Author of all so far from our contemplation, we might well prefer the faith of
—the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.
The father of English poetry, who well knew what qualities and habits might with most probability be assigned to men of different professions, has made it a trait in the character of his Doctour of Phisike, that
His study was but little in the Bible.