in who produces nothing worse than a
harmless worm, may surely be suffered to go blameless. Let these
electricians pursue their experiments, and make all the worms they can.
They will incur no very grave responsibility for such additions as they
can make to that stream of life which is pouring from every crack and
crevice of the earth. Some persons have a vague idea, that there is
something derogatory to the lowest form of animal life to have its origin
in merely inorganic elements; an idea which results perhaps not so much
from any subtle and elevated conceptions of life, as from an imagination
unawakened to the dignity and the marvel of the inorganic world. What is
motion but a sort of life? a life of activity if not of feeling.
Suppose--what indeed nowhere exists--an inert matter, and let it be
suddenly endowed with motion, so that two particles should fly towards
each other from the utmost bounds of the universe; were not this almost as
strange a property as that which endows an irritable tissue or an organ of
secretion? Is not the world _one_--the creature of one God--dividing
itself, with constant interchange of parts, into the sentient and the
non-sentient, in order, so to speak, to become conscious of itself? Are we
to place a great chasm between the sentient and the non-sentient, so that
it shall be derogation to a poor worm to have no higher genealogy than
the element which is the lightning of heaven, and too much honour to the
subtle chemistry of the earth to be the father of a crawling subject, of
some bag, or sack, or imperceptible globule of animal life? No; we have no
recoil against this generation of an animalcule by the wonderful chemistry
of God; our objection to this doctrine is, that it is not proved.

But, proved or not, our author has still the most difficult part of his
task to accomplish. From his animated globule he has to develop the whole
creation of vegetable and animal life. We shall be contented with watching
its development through one branch, that of the animal kingdom.

The idea of the development of the animal creation from certain primary
rudiments or simple forms of life, is due, we believe, to Lamarck; and
although his peculiar theory has met, and deservedly, with ridicule, we do
not hesitate to say that it is far more plausible, and substantially far
more rational, than that which our author has substituted. Geology reveals
to us a gradual extinction of species, accompanied by a succ