s perfecting progress.

Mr. Darwin presents the most preposterous assumptions with such coolness
and apparent unconsciousness of their utter improbability to his
readers, and with such an entire ignoring of the necessity of any
further attestation than his own _ipse dixit_, as to warrant serious
suspicions of his sanity. Take, for instance, his bear and whale story.
Hearne reports having seen in the Arctic regions a bear swimming in the
water for hours, with his mouth wide open, catching flies; and Mr.
Darwin says if the supply of flies were constant (where the winter lasts
eight months of the year 40 deg. below zero) _he can see no difficulty in
the production at length of an animal as monstrous as a whale_! M.
Comte's disciples never suspected their master's sanity till he invented
a religion for them.

2. This theory, it should be remembered, is _merely a theory_, _a mere
notion_, _a hypothesis_. It is not even alleged that it is based upon
facts actually discovered. The alleged facts of the cooling of the
nebulae, the chemical origin of life upon our globe, and the development
of the original Ascidian into the fish, and that into the monkey, and of
the monkey into the man, never were witnessed by anybody, nor could they
be witnessed. La Place was honest enough to call his part of the theory,
The Nebular _Hypothesis_. He had no idea of claiming for it the rank of
a fact of science upon which he, or anybody else, might build a system.
Nor are the modern assertors of evolution able to establish a single
instance of the chemical origin of life at the present day; though
thousands of experiments have been made attempting that exploit, by
English, French, and German chemists during the last forty years. Nor
has a single case of the transmutation of species ever been observed in
wild animals or plants; nor has any change of species been produced in
tame ones by domestication or culture. No naturalist has seen a
community of apes in the process of improvement toward manhood; nor has
any philologist described the first attempts of the monkeys toward the
articulation of language, or the manufacture of clothing, unless we
except Mr. Lemuel Gulliver's interesting account of the Yahoos. It must
be acknowledged that the animals described by that accurate observer,
and graphic describer, approach more nearly to those required by Mr.
Darwin's theory than any ever seen before, or since. Hence it is greatly
to be desired that some s