Natural selection not inconsistent with natural theology : a free examination of Darwin's treatise On the origin of species, and of its American reviewers / by Asa Gray.
- Asa Gray
- Date:
- 1861
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Natural selection not inconsistent with natural theology : a free examination of Darwin's treatise On the origin of species, and of its American reviewers / by Asa Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
22/56 page 22
![inference is really true. Certainly it is not yet generally accepted; but ■ a strong current is setting towards its acceptance. |] So long as universal cataclysms were in vogue, and all life upon the f| earth was thought to have been suddenly destroyed and renewed many times in succession, such a view could not be thought of. So the equiv- alent view maintained by Agassiz, and formerly, we believe, by D’Or- bigny, that, irrespectively of general and sudden catastrophes, or any • known adequate physical cause, there has been a total depopulation at the close of each geological period or formation, say forty or fifty times * or more, followed by as many independent great acts of creation, at which | alone have species been originated, and at each of which a vegetable and an animal kingdom were produced entire and complete, full-fledged, as ! flourishing, as wide-spread and populous, as varied and mutually adapt- ! ed from the beginning as ever afterwards, — such a view, of course, | supersedes all material connection between successive species, and re- ; moves even the association and geographical range of species entirely j out of the domain of physical causes and of natural science. This is the I extreme opposite of Wallace’s and Darwin’s view, and is quite as hypo- ; thetical. The nearly universal opinion, if Ave rightly gather it, mani- • festly is, that the replacement of the species of successive formations was not complete and simultaneous, but partial and successive; and that along the course of each epoch some species probably were in- i troduced, and some, doubtless, became extinct. If all since the ter- tiary belongs to our present epoch, this is certainly true of it: if to two or mqfe epochs, then the hypothesis of a total change is not true of them. Geology makes huge demands upon time; and we regret to find that it has exhausted ours, — that what we meant for the briefest and most general sketch of some geological considerations in favor of Darwin’s hypothesis has so extended as to leave no room for considering “ the great facts of comparative anatomy and zoology” with which Darwin’s theory “ very well accords,” nor for indicating how “ it admirably serves for explaining the unity of composition of all organisms, the existence of representative and rudimentary organs, and the natural series which genera and species compose.” Suffice it to say that these are the real strongholds of the new system on its theoretical side; that it goes far towards explaining both the physiological and the structural gradations and relations between the two kingdoms, and the arrangement of all I their forms in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great i types ; that it reads the riddle of abortive organs and of morphological 9 conformity, of which no other theory has ever offered a scientific expla- I nation, and supplies a ground for harmonizing the two fundamental I ideas which naturalists and philosophers conceive to have ruled the ■](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22344949_0022.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
