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e of Covent Garden next season, I will let you know, that you may dispose accordingly of your property in it. I have finished the "Vestiges of Creation." I became more reconciled to the theory it presents towards the close of the book, for obvious reasons. Of course, when, abandoning his positive chain (as he conceives it) of proved progression, after leading the whole universe from inorganic matter up to the "paragon of animals," the climax of development, man, he goes on to say that it is _impossible_ to limit the future progress, or predict the future destinies of this noble human result, he forsakes his own ground of material demonstration, on which he has jumped, as the French say, _a peds joints_, over many an impediment, and relieves himself (and me) by the hypothesis, which, after all, in no way belongs peculiarly to his system, that other and higher destinies, developments, may, and probably do, await humanity than anything it has yet attained here: a theory which, though most agreeable to the love of life and desire of perfection of most human creatures, in no sort hinges logically on to his _absolute chain of material progression_ and development. From the moment, however, that he admitted this view, instead of the one which I think legitimately belongs to his theory, irreconcilable as it seemed to me with what preceded it, the book became less distasteful to me, although I do not think the soundness of his theory (even admitting all his facts, which I am quite too ignorant to dispute) established by his work. Supposing his premises to be all correct, I think he does not make out his own case satisfactorily; and many of the conclusions in particular instances appear to me to be tacked or basted (to speak womanly) together loosely and clumsily, and yet with an effect of more mutual relation, coherence, and cohesion than really belongs to them. Mr. Combe is delighted with the book--because it quotes him and his brother, and professes a belief in phrenology; but Mr. Combe himself allowed that the main proposition of the work is not logically deduced from its arguments, and moreover admitted that though well versed in _all_ the branches of natural science, the author was perfectly master of _none_. He attributes the authorship to his friend Robert Chambers, or perhaps to the joint labor of him and his brother William. If his surmise in this respect is true there would be obvious reasons why they should not ack
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