These are the advances towards generation by chemistry and electricity. The process, however, according to this detail, appears still far from complete. Albumen is to be produced "by artificial means;" and even then we should doubt entire success. Chemists have long commanded the power to resolve the seeds of animal and vegetable life into their elements; they have analysed them, and shown the exact weight and proportion of each constituent; but they never could put them together again, or, by any similar compound produce the primordial egg or organic germ, from which a living being would arise. A connecting link—a vital spark, or animating soul—is always wanting to complete the existence of the Prometheus of the laboratory. Mark, too, the "if," and the "might," in this most lame and impotent hypothesis:—"If, therefore, these globules be identical with the cells which are held to be reproductive, it might be said," &c. Globules can be easily produced; the passage of the electric fluid through water will produce aerial globules in rapid and expansive movement; boys can produce them with suds and a tobacco-pipe in rapid succession, each, for aught we know, containing a "granule" that multiplies by "fissiporous generation." But these are not organic globules, and the author has committed the great perversion in language or logic of confounding the organic globule of life with the inorganic globule of a chemist. His theory is more fanciful than that of LAMARCK, from whom it is derived, and who had, at least, his petit corps gelatineux to begin with—to commence weaving organic tissue from—but our author's organic globule is not so substantive a conception; and as he does not pretend to be able to produce even this by physical means, he has not made a single step in generation.
This we consider the least satisfactory and successful portion of the author's work. It assigns no intelligible cause for the origin of life—it only begs the question, by the substitution of one mystery for another. His law of DEVELOPMENT is of the same description,—without sense or significancy, unsupported by applicable facts, and is not so comprehensible a cause of vital changes as LAMARCK'S assigned progressive tendencies of animals to master the appliances essential to their wants.
ANIMAL AFFINITIES, INSTINCT, AND REASON.
The scheme of the Vestiges is uniformly and consistently worked out; all phenomena are resolved into gravitation and development—the first as the law of inorganic, the latter of organic matter. By the last, however, no new principle is revealed, only a new phrase devised, by the amplified application of which the author's entire system may be said to be begged rather than proved; since development is used in a sense implying an indefinite power of animate and inanimate creation; so that at last we make no new discovery, only grasp a new nomenclature.
But the author is always interesting, either by the novel display of facts or the ingenious concatenation of plausibilities. Consistently with his fundamental notion of animal transmutation, he tries to prove a family likeness or affinity from the humblest to the highest species. In this way he seeks to explain the marvel with respect to the huge bulk of many of the tertiary mammalia—the mammoth, mastadon, and megatherium; they were in immediate descent from the cetacea, or whale and dolphin tribe. (p. 267.) Again, human reason is considered no exclusive gift; it exists subordinately in the instinct of brutes, and is alleged to be nothing more than a mode of operation peculiar to the faculties in a humble state of endowment, or early stage of development. CUVIER and NEWTON are only intellectual expansions of a clown; and this notion is extended to moral obliquities, the wicked man being characterised as one "whose highest moral feelings are rudimental." (p. 358.) From a like principle the writer concurs with Dr. PRICHARD, that mankind may have had a common origin; that there exists no diversities of colour or osseous structure not referable to climatable or other plastic agencies influencing the development of the different races, commencing with the lowest, or Negro tribe, and ascending upward through the intermediate aboriginal American, Mongolian, and Malay, to the last and most perfect stage of the Caucasian type.
Into the verity of these conclusions we are not called upon to enter; they have been long in controversy, involve a great array of facts and inductive inferences, and we have only referred to them as corollaries or collaterals of the author's hypothetical fabric.
RELIGIOUS AND MORAL TENDENCIES.
We have no charge of impiety to bring against the Vestiges. Final causes, or to express ourselves more intelligibly, a purpose in creation, is nowhere impugned. The Deity is not degraded by impersonification in the form and frailties of mortality, but everywhere the author reverently bows to that august and unsearchable name, acknowledges the grand and benevolent design—the admirable adaptation of every created thing to its end and place, and finally concludes in a strain of grateful and exulting Optimism, that we confess we have not fully arrived at—namely, that everything "is very good." (p. 387.) From this impression we have only one constructive drawback to notice in the author's mechanical but fanciful constitution of the universe, by which a special Providence in the government of the world seems to be dispensed with, and the Almighty is placed in the sinecure position of the Grand Elector of the Abbe SIEYES, with nothing to do. But no divine attribute is abscinded—no glory of Omnipotence dimmed—whether it pleases him to rule by direct interpositions of power, or his own pre-ordained eternal laws.
Still less can we detect in the speculative inquiries of the Vestiges conclusions hostile to the moral and social interests of the community. Men are formed to be what they are; vice and crime are the fruits of malorganization, and malorganization is the result of the unfavourable conditions in which the subject of it has been placed, prior or subsequent to birth. These are the author's leading metaphysical inculcations. They impose grave duties upon individuals and upon society, rightly understood and applied, but we cannot discern a hurtful tendency in them. They are useful knowledge, knowledge that it would be well for parents and rulers to master, by showing the importance of education, of favourable circumstances, and of good moral and physical training, for rearing happy, well-ordered, and virtuous members of the community. Supreme in intelligence, man, we firmly believe, is not less supremely blessed in the means of felicity, provided his real nature and position in the scheme of creation were understood, recognised, and carried out. He has his place, his office, and his destiny; he is no enigma but as an individual; "in the mass," as the author emphatically remarks, "he is a mathematical problem." His conduct is uniform and consistent; the result of known and ascertainable causes—causes calculable and predicable in their consequences, as the statistics of crime have incontestibly established.