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 produced by secondary laws. On this same view we can understand how it is that in a region where many species of a genus have been produced, and where they now flourish, these same species should present many varieties; for where the manufactory of species has been active, we might expect, as a general rule, to find it still in action; and this is the case if varieties be incipient species. Moreover, the species of the larger genera, which afford the greater number of varieties or incipient species, retain to a certain degree the character of varieties; for they differ from each other by a less amount of difference than do the species of smaller genera. The closely allied species also of the larger genera apparently have restricted ranges, and in their affinities they are clustered in little groups round other species — in both respects resembling varieties. These are strange relations on the view that each species was independently created, but are intelligible if each existed first as a variety.

As each species tends by its geometrical rate of reproduction to increase inordinately in number; and as the modified descendants of each species will be enabled to increase by as much as they become more diversified in habits and structure, so as to be able to seize on many and widely different places in the economy of nature, there will be a constant tendency in natural selection to preserve the most divergent offspring of any one species. Hence, during a long-continued course of modification, the slight differences, characteristic of varieties of the same species, tend to be augmented into the greater differences characteristic of the species of the same genus. New and improved varieties will inevitably supplant and exterminate the older, less improved, and intermediate varieties; and thus species are rendered to a large extent defined and distinct objects. Dominant species belonging to the larger groups within each class tend to give birth to new and dominant forms; so that each large group tends to become still larger, and at the same time more divergent in character. But as all groups cannot thus go on increasing in size, for the world would not hold them, the more dominant groups beat the less dominant. This tendency in the large groups to go on increasing in size and diverging in character, together with the inevitable contingency of much extinction, explains the arrangement of all the forms of life in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great classes, which has prevailed throughout all time. This grand fact of the grouping of all organic beings under what is called the Natural System, is utterly inexplicable on the theory of creation.

As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modifications;

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 it can act only by short and slow steps. Hence, the canon of "Natura non facit saltum," which every fresh addition to our knowledge tends to confirm, is on this theory intelligible. We can see why throughout nature the same general end is gained by an almost infinite diversity of means, for every peculiarity when once acquired is long inherited, and structures already modified in many different ways have to be adapted for the same general purpose. We can, in short, see why nature is prodigal in variety, though niggard in innovation. But why this should be a law of nature if each species has been independently created no man can explain.

Many other facts are, as it seems to me, explicable on this theory. How strange it is that a bird, under the form of a woodpecker, should prey on insects on the ground; that upland geese which rarely or never swim, should possess webbed feet; that a thrush-like bird should dive and feed on sub-aquatic insects; and that a petrel should have the habits and structure fitting it for the life of an auk! and so in endless other cases. But on the view of each species constantly trying to increase in number, with natural selection always ready to adapt the slowly varying descendants of each to any unoccupied or ill-occupied place in nature, these facts cease to be strange, or might even have been anticipated.

We can to a certain extent understand how it is that there is so much beauty throughout nature; for this may be largely attributed to the agency of selection. That beauty, according to our sense of it, is not universal, must be admitted by every one who will look at some venomous snakes, at some fishes, and at certain hideous bats with a distorted resemblance to the human face. Sexual selection has given the most brilliant colours, elegant patterns, and other ornaments to the males, and sometimes to both sexes of many birds, butterflies, and other animals. With birds it has often rendered the voice of the male musical to the female, as well as to our ears. Flowers and fruit have been rendered conspicuous by brilliant colours in contrast with the green foliage, in order that the flowers may be readily seen, visited and fertilised by insects, and the seeds disseminated by birds. How it comes that certain colours, sounds, and forms should give pleasure to man and the lower animals, — that is, that is, how the sense of beauty in its simplest form was first acquired, — we do not know any more than how certain odours and flavours were first rendered agreeable.

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts and improves the inhabitants of each country only in relation to their co-inhabitants; so that we need feel no surprise at the species of any

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 one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been created and specially adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land. Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far. as we can judge, absolutely perfect, as in the case even of the human eye; or if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee, when used against an enemy, causing the bee's own death; at drones being produced in such great numbers for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen-bee for her own fertile daughters; at the Ichneumonidæ feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars; or at other such cases. The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been detected.

The complex and little known laws governing the production of varieties are the same, as far as we can judge, with the laws which have governed the production of distinct species. In both cases physical conditions seem to have produced some direct and definite effect, but how much we cannot say. Thus, when varieties enter any new station, they occasionally assume some of the characters proper to the species of that station. With both varieties and species, use and disuse seem to have produced a considerable effect; for it is impossible to resist this conclusion when we look, for instance, at the logger-headed duck, which has wings incapable of flight, in nearly the same condition as in the domestic duck; or when we look at the burrowing tucu-tucu, which is occasionally blind, and then at certain moles, which are habitually blind and have their eyes covered with skin; or when we look at the blind animals inhabiting the dark caves of America and Europe. With varieties and species, correlated variation seems to have played an important part, so that when one part has been modified other parts have been necessarily modified. With both parties and.species, reversions to long-lost characters occasionally occur. How inexplicable on the theory of creation is the occasional appearance of stripes on the shoulders and legs of the several species of the horse-genus and of their hybrids! How simply is this fact explained if we believe that these species are all descended from a striped progenitor, in the same manner as the several domestic breeds of the pigeon are descended from the blue and barred rock-pigeon!

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, why should specific characters, or those by which the

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 species of the same genus differ from each other, be more variable than generic characters in which they all agree? Why, for instance, should the colour of a flower be more likely to vary in any one species of a genus, if the other species possess differently coloured flowers, than if all possessed the same coloured flowers? If species are only well-marked varieties, of which the characters have become in a high degree permanent, we can understand this fact; for they have already varied since they branched off from a common progenitor in certain characters, by which they have come to be specifically distinct from each other; therefore these same characters would be more likely again to vary than the generic characters which have been inherited without change for an immense period. It is inexplicable on the theory of creation why a part developed in a very unusual manner in species alone of a genus, and therefore, as we may naturally infer, of great importance to that species, should be eminently liable to variation; but, on our view, this part has undergone, since the several species branched off from a common progenitor, an unusual amount of variability and modification, and therefore we might expect the part generally to be still variable. But a part may be developed in the most unusual manner, like the wing of a bat, and yet not be more variable than any other structure, if the part be common to many subordinate forms, that is, if it has been inherited for a very long period; for in this case, it will have been rendered constant by long-continued natural selection.

Glancing at instincts, marvellous as some are, they offer no greater difficulty than do corporeal structures on the theory of the natural selection of successive slight, but profitable modifications. We can thus understand why nature moves by graduated steps in endowing different animals of the same class with their several instincts. I have attempted to show how much light the principle of gradation throws on the admirable architectural powers of the hive-bee. Habit no doubt often comes into play in modifying instincts; but it certainly is not indispensable, as we see in the case of neuter insects, which leave no progeny to inherit the effects of long-continued habit. On the view of all the species of the same genus having descended from a common parent, and having inherited much in common, we can understand how it is that allied species, when placed under widely different conditions of life, yet follow nearly the same instincts; why the thrushes of tropical and temperate South America, for instance, line their nests with mud like our British species. On the view of instincts having been slowly acquired through natural selection, we need not marvel

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 at some instincts being not perfect and liable to mistakes, and at many instincts causing other animals to suffer.

If species be only well-marked and permanent varieties, we can at once see why their crossed offspring should follow the same complex laws in their degrees and kinds of resemblance to their parents, — in being absorbed into each other by successive crosses, and in other such points, — as do the crossed offspring of acknowledged varieties. This similarity would be a strange fact, if species had been independently created and varieties had been produced through secondary laws.

If we admit that the geological record is imperfect to an extreme degree, then the facts, which the record does give, strongly support the theory of descent with modification. New species have come on the stage slowly and at successive intervals; and the amount of change, after equal intervals of time, is widely different in different groups. The extinction of species and of whole groups of species which has played so conspicuous a part in the history of the organic world almost inevitably follows from the principle of natural selection; for old forms are supplanted by new and improved forms. Neither single species nor groups of species reappear when the chain of ordinary generation is once broken. The gradual diffusion of dominant forms, with the slow modification of their descendants, causes the forms of life, after long intervals of time, to appear as if they had changed simultaneously throughout the world. The fact of the fossil remains of each formation being in some degree intermediate in character between the fossils in the formations above and below, is simply explained by their intermediate position in the chain of descent. The grand fact that all extinct beings can be classed with all recent beings, naturally follows from the living and the extinct being the offspring of common parents. As species have generally diverged in character during their long course of descent and modification, we can understand why it is that the more ancient forms, or early progenitors of each group, so often occupy a position in some degree intermediate between existing groups. Recent forms are generally looked upon as being, on the whole, higher in the scale of organisation than ancient forms; and they must be higher, insofar as the later and more improved forms have conquered the older and less improved forms in the struggle for life; they have also generally had their organs more specialised for different functions. This fact is perfectly compatible with numerous beings still retaining simple and but little improved structures, fitted for simple conditions of life; it is likewise compatible with some

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 forms having retrograded in organisation, by having become at each stage of descent better fitted for new and degraded habits of life. Lastly, the wonderful law of the long endurance of allied forms on the same continent, — of marsupials in Australia, of Edentata in America, and other such cases, — is intelligible, for within the same country the existing and the extinct will be closely allied by descent.

Looking to geographical distribution, if we admit that there has been during the long course of ages much migration from one part of the world to another, owing to former climatal and geographical changes and to the many occasional and unknown means of dispersal, then we can understand, on the theory of descent with modification, most of the great leading facts in Distribution. We can see why there should be so striking a parallelism in the distribution of organic beings throughout space, and in their geological succession throughout time; for in both cases the beings have been connected by the bond of ordinary generation, and the means of modification have been the same. We see the full meaning of the wonderful fact, which has struck every traveller, namely, that on the same continent, under the most diverse conditions, under heat and cold, on mountain and lowland, on deserts and marshes, most of the inhabitants within each great class are plainly related; for they are the descendants of the same progenitors and early colonists. On this same principle of former migration, combined in most cases with modification, we can understand, by the aid of the Glacial period, the identity of some few plants, and the close alliance of many others, on the most distant mountains, and in the northern and southern temperate zones; and likewise the close alliance of some of the inhabitants of the sea in the northern and southern temperate latitudes, though separated by the whole intertropical ocean. Although two countries may present physical conditions as closely similar as the same species ever require, we need feel no surprise at their inhabitants being widely different, if they have been for a long period completely sundered from each other; for as the relation of organism to organism is the most important of all relations, and as the two countries will have received colonists at various periods and in different proportions, from some other country or from each other, the course of modification in the two areas will inevitably have been different.

On this view of migration, with subsequent modification, we see why oceanic islands are inhabited by only few species, but of these, why many are peculiar or endemic forms. We clearly see why species belonging to those groups of animals which cannot

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 cross wide spaces of the ocean, as frogs and terrestrial mammals, do not inhabit oceanic islands; and why, on the other hand, new and peculiar species of bats, animals which can traverse the ocean, are found on islands far distant from any continent. Such cases as the presence of peculiar species of bats on oceanic islands and the absence of all other terrestrial mammals, are facts utterly inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation.

The existence of closely allied or representative species in any two areas, implies, on the theory of descent with modification, that the same parent-forms formerly inhabited both areas; and we almost invariably find that wherever many closely allied species inhabit two areas, some identical species are still common to both. Wherever many closely allied yet distinct species occur, doubtful forms and varieties belonging to the same groups likewise occur. It is a rule of high generality that the inhabitants of each area are related to the inhabitants of the nearest source whence immigrants might have been derived. We see this in the striking relation of nearly all plants and animals of the Galapagos Archipelago, of Juan Fernandez, and of the other American islands, to the plants and animals of the neighbouring American mainland; and of those of the Cape de Verde Archipelago, and of the other African islands to the African mainland. It must be admitted that these facts receive no explanation on the theory of creation.

The fact, as we have seen, that all past and present organic beings can be arranged within a few great classes, in groups subordinate to groups, and with the extinct groups often falling in between the recent groups, is intelligible on the theory of natural selection with its contingencies of extinction and divergence of character. On these same principles we see how it is, that the mutual affinities of the forms within each class are so complex and circuitous. We see why certain characters are far more serviceable than others for classification; — why adaptive characters, though of paramount importance to the beings, are of hardly any importance in classification; why characters derived from rudimentary parts, though of no service to the beings, are often of high classificatory value; and why embryological characters are often the most valuable of all. The real affinities of all organic beings, in contradistinction to their adaptive resemblances, are due to inheritance or community of descent. The Natural System is a genealogical arrangement, with the acquired grades of difference, marked by the terms, varieties, species, genera, families, &c.; and we have to discover the lines of descent by the most permanent characters whatever they may be and of however slight vital importance.

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 The similar framework of bones in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse, — the same number of vertebræ forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant, — and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications. The similarity of pattern in the wing and in the leg of a bat, though used for such different purpose, — in the jaws and legs of a crab, — in the petals, stamens, and pistils of a flower, is likewise, to a large extent, intelligible on the view of the gradual modification of parts or organs, which were aboriginally alike in an early progenitor in each of these classes. On the principle of successive variations not always supervening at an early age, and being inherited at a corresponding not early period of life, we clearly see why the embryos of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes should be so closely similar, and so unlike the adult forms. We may cease marvelling at the embryo of an air-breathing mammal or bird having branchial slits and arteries running in loops, like those of a fish which has to breathe the air dissolved in water by the aid of well-developed branchiæ.

Disuse, aided sometimes by natural selection, will often have reduced organs when rendered useless under changed habits or conditions of life; and we can understand on this view the meaning of rudimentary organs. But disuse and selection will generally act on each creature, when it has come to maturity and has to play its full part in the struggle for existence, and will thus have little power on an organ during early life; hence the organ will not be reduced or rendered rudimentary at this early age. The calf, for instance, has inherited teeth, which never cut through the gums of the upper jaw, from an early progenitor having well-developed teeth; and we may believe, that the teeth in the mature animal were formerly reduced by disuse, owing to the tongue and palate, or lips, having become excellently fitted through natural selection to browse without their aid; whereas in the calf, the teeth have been left unaffected, and on the principle of inheritance at corresponding ages have been inherited from a remote period to the present day. On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility, such as the teeth in the embryonic calf or the shrivelled wings under the soldered wingcovers of many beetles, should so frequently occur. Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal her scheme of modification, by means of rudimentary organs, of embryological

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 and homologous structures, but we are too blind to understand her meaning.

I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified, during a long course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously. It appears that I formerly underrated the frequency and value of these latter forms of variation, as leading to permanent modifications of structure independently of natural selection. But as my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position- namely, at the close of the Introduction — the following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.

It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers. The undulatory theory of light has thus been arrived at; and the belief in the revolution of the earth on its own axis was until lately supported by hardly any direct evidence. It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction; notwithstanding that Leibnitz formerly accused Newton of introducing "occult qualities and miracles into philosophy."

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the

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 attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, "as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion." A celebrated author and divine has written to me that "he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws."

Why, it may be asked, until recently did nearly all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists disbelieve in the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quality; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile, and varieties invariably fertile; or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without proof, that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded us plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they had undergone mutation.

But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to clear and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting great changes of which we do not see the steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the agencies which we see still at work. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the "plan of creation" or "unity of design," &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of

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Rh a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future,—to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for thus only can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.

Several eminent naturalists have of late published their belief that a multitude of reputed species in each genus are not real species; but that other species are real, that is, have been independently created. This seems to me a strange conclusion to arrive at. They admit that a multitude of forms, which till lately they themselves thought were special creations, and which are still thus looked at by the majority of naturalists, and which consequently have all the external characteristic features of true species,—they admit that these have been produced by variation, but they refuse to extend the same view to other and slightly different forms. Nevertheless they do not pretend that they can define, or even conjecture, which are the created forms of life, and which are those produced by secondary laws. They admit variation as a vera causa in one case, they arbitrarily reject it in another, without assigning any distinction in the two cases. The day will come when this will be given as a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion. These authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth. But do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown? and in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb? Undoubtedly some of these same questions cannot be answered by those who believe in the appearance or creation of only a few forms of life, or of some one form alone. It has been maintained by several authors that it is as easy to believe in the creation of a million beings as of one; but Maupertuis' philosophical axiom "of least action" leads the mind more willingly to admit the smaller number; and certainly we ought not to believe that innumerable beings within each great class have been created with plain, but deceptive, marks of descent from a single parent.

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424 As a record of a former state of things, I have retained in the foregoing paragraphs, and elsewhere, several sentences which imply that naturalists believe in the separate creation of each species; and I have been much censured for having thus expressed myself. But undoubtedly this was the general belief when the first edition of the present work appeared. I formerly spoke to very many naturalists on the subject of evolution, and never once met with any sympathetic agreement. It is probable that some did then believe in evolution, but they were either silent, or expressed themselves so ambiguously that it was not easy to understand their meaning. Now things are wholly changed, and almost every naturalist admits the great principle of evolution. There are, however, some who still think that species have suddenly given birth, through quite unexplained means, to new and totally different forms: but, as I have attempted to show, weighty evidence can be opposed to the admission of great and abrupt modifications. Under a scientific point of view, and as leading to further investigation, but little advantage is gained by believing that new forms are suddenly developed in an inexplicable manner from old and widely different forms, over the old belief in the creation of species from the dust of the earth.

It may be asked how far I extend the doctrine of the modification of species. The question is difficult to answer, because the more distinct the forms are which we consider, by so much the arguments in favour of community of descent become fewer in number and less in force. But some arguments of the greatest weight extend very far. All the members of whole classes are connected together by a chain of affinities, and all can be classed on the same principle, in groups subordinate to groups. Fossil remains sometimes tend to fill up very wide intervals between existing orders.

Organs in a rudimentary condition plainly show that an early progenitor had the organ in a fully developed condition; and this in some cases implies an enormous amount of modification in the descendants. Throughout whole classes various structures are formed on the same pattern, and at a very early age the embryos closely resemble each other. Therefore I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modification embraces all the members of the same great class or kingdom. I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.

Analogy would lead me one step farther, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living

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 things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability to injurious influences. We see this even in so trifling a fact as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gallfly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak-tree. With all organic beings excepting perhaps some of the very lowest, sexual production seems to be essentially similar. With all, as far as is at present known the germinal vesicle is the same; so that all organisms start from a common origin. If we look even to the two main divisions — namely, to the animal and vegetable kingdoms — certain low forms are so far intermediate in character that naturalists have disputed to which kingdom they should be referred. As Professor Asa Gray has remarked, "The spores and other reproductive bodies of many of the lower algæ may claim to have first a characteristically animal, and then an unequivocally vegetable existence." Therefore, on the principle of natural selection with divergence of character, it does not seem incredible that, from such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may have been developed; and, if we admit this, we must likewise admit that all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form. But this inference is chiefly grounded on analogy and it is immaterial whether or not it be accepted. No doubt it is possible, as Mr. G. H. Lewes has urged, that at the first commencement of life many different forms were evolved; but if so we may conclude that only a very few have left modified descendants. For, as I have recently remarked in regard to the members of each great kingdom, such as the Vertebrata, Articulata, &c., we have distinct evidence in their embryological homologous and rudimentary structures that within each kingdom all the members are descended from a single progenitor.

When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, or when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history. Systematists will be able to pursue their labours as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt whether this or that form be a true species. This, I feel sure and I speak after experience, will be no slight relief. The endless disputes whether or not some fifty species of British brambles are good species will cease. Systematists will have only to decide (not that this will be easy) whether any form be sufficiently constant and distinct from other forms,

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 to be capable of definition; and if definable, whether the differences be sufficiently important to deserve a specific name. This latter point will become a far more essential consideration than it is at present; for differences, however slight, between any two forms if not blended by intermediate gradations, are looked at by most naturalists as sufficient to raise both forms to the rank of species.

Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed, to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations, whereas species were formerly thus connected. Hence, without rejecting the consideration of the present existence of intermediate gradations between any two forms we shall be led to weigh more carefully and to value higher the actual amount of difference between them. It is quite possible that forms now generally acknowledged to be merely varieties may hereafter be thought worthy of specific names; and in this case scientific and common language will come into accordance. In short, we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be free from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species.

The other and more general departments of natural history will rise greatly in interest. The terms used by naturalists, of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, &c., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification. When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a long history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical invention is the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting,— I speak from experience,— does the study of natural history become!

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct action of external conditions, and so forth. The study of domestic productions will rise immensely in value. A new variety raised by man will be a more important and interesting subject for study than one more species added to the infinitude of

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 already recorded species. Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation. The rules for classifying will no doubt become simpler when we have a definite object in view. We possess no pedigrees or armorial bearings; and we have to discover and trace the many diverging lines of descent in our natural genealogies, by characters of any kind which have long been inherited. Rudimentary organs will speak infallibly with respect to the nature of long-lost structures. Species and groups of species which are called aberrant, and which may fancifully be called living fossils, will aid us in forming a picture of the ancient forms of life. Embryology will often reveal to us the structure, in some degree obscured, of the prototype of each great class.

When we feel assured that all the individuals of the same species, and all the closely allied species of most genera, have within a not very remote period descended from one parent, and have migrated from some one birth-place; and when we better know the many means of migration, then, by the light which geology now throws, and will continue to throw, on former changes of climate and of the level of the land, we shall surely be enabled to trace in an admirable manner the former migrations of the inhabitants of the whole world. Even at present, by comparing the differences between the inhabitants of the sea on the opposite sides of a continent, and the nature of the various inhabitants on that continent, in relation to their apparent means of immigration, some light can be thrown on ancient geography.

The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its imbedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals. The accumulation of each great fossiliferous formation will be recognised as having depended on an unusual concurrence of favourable circumstances, and the blank intervals between the successive stages as having been of vast duration. But we shall be able to gauge with some security the duration of these intervals by a comparison of the preceding and succeeding organic forms. We must be cautious in attempting to correlate as strictly contemporaneous two formations, which do not include many identical species, by the general succession of the forms of life. As species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing causes, and not by miraculous acts of creation; and as the most important of all causes of organic change is one which is almost independent of altered and perhaps suddenly altered physical conditions, namely, the

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 Rh Gaels or Brythons is indifferent), and had received the distinctive stamp of the Celtic temperament.

Three years have passed since I formulated these conclusions. I have striven to keep touch of the subject since then; I have recently had occasion to review it in all its bearings. With all respect to my learned opponents, I may venture to assert, not only that my conclusions have not been controverted, they have not even been seriously challenged


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 mutual relation of organism to organism,— the improvement of one organism entailing the improvement or the extermination of others; it follows, that the amount of organic change in the fossils of consecutive formations probably serves as a fair measure of the relative though not actual lapse of time. A number of species, however, keeping in a body might remain for a long period unchanged, whilst within the same period several of these species by migrating into new countries and coming into competition with foreign associates, might become modified; so that we must not overrate the accuracy of organic change as a measure of time.

In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

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 It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

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text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Criticism and the Essay I.


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Criticism and the Essay II.


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Author:William Allan Neilson

Works

 * "The Variorum Love’s Labour’s Lost" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 95, Number 568 (February 1905)
 * (ed.) The Harvard Classics, Volume 51 (1914)
 * "The Elizabethan Drama" in The Harvard Classics, Vol. 51 (1914)
 * "The Elizabethan Adventures" in The Harvard Classics, Vol. 51 (1914)
 * Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Neilson translation)
 * Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Neilson translation)

title: Author:William Allan Neilson


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Criticism and the Essay III.


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Criticism and the Essay IV.


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O ONE can turn over the pages of The Harvard Classics without realizing how much of the most delightful writing of the last three hundred years has taken the form of the essay. No literary form is more flexible than this, and no form except lyric poetry has touched upon a wider variety of topics. Yet there is one subject of enduring human interest to which essayists are perpetually turning, and upon which they always find something new to say. It is the subject of Books and Reading. In the essays which deal with this perennially interesting topic, there is a constant expression of literary judgments—judgments that convey racial and national convictions, the ruling ideas of a generation or a school, or the likes and dislikes of individuals. These judgments, properly collected and classified, become the material for a history of literary criticism. Indeed, a surprisingly large proportion of the epoch-making documents of criticism are really essays, both in form and mood.

The significance of the essay in the formation and perpetuation of critical doctrine is also apparent if one turns to the formal histories of criticism. Systematic treatises on the theory of the fine arts, including literature, have appeared at intervals since the time of Aristotle. The science of aesthetics, as we know it, was developed in Germany during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it forms an integral portion of the philosophical system of Kant and of many other philosophers. But these formal treatises upon the nature of beauty, involving as they do the analysis of the beautiful as it exists in the natural world and in works of art, appeal primarily 239


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240 to a few thinkers and scholars, and not to the general public. It is true that men of genius like Goethe, Schiller, and Burke have the faculty of discussing the philosophic basis of aesthetic theories in such a way as to make them interesting and highly instructive to the general reader. But as a rule the systematic treatises upon the nature and history of the fine arts, and of literature in particular, have been necessarily addressed to a limited audience. The discussions which have really caught the ear of the public have been the casual utterances of brilliant men in the act of attacking or defending a literary creed, of writing a preface to a book or a play, or of hazarding, in some dialogue, pamphlet, or essay, a new opinion about beauty, a new theory of poetry or of prose.

WHAT IS AN ESSAY?

To understand, therefore, the history of actual critical opinion, one must study the essay. It is a very variable, highly personalized literary form: resembling now a dinner-table monologue or dialogue, and now a letter to a friend. Here it is a mere sparkling fragment of some solid mass of philosophical theory, and there it is a tiny jewel of paradox, interrogation, or fancy; here an echo of some great historical debate over tragedy or comedy, and there the first faint stirring of some new, living idea, which by and by will be tossed about with all the winds of doctrine. But however changeable this literary type may be, one who reads the various essays in The Harvard Classics can hardly fail to get a general notion of the nature of "the essay." The type will gradually make itself clear to him, as something different from the formal treatise, the dialogue or the letter or the magazine article. He will learn to watch the type emerge into clear outline with Montaigne and Bacon. He will see that it modifies itself under the influence of national traits or of the fashions of successive historical periods, that it differentiates itself into species and varieties, precisely as other literary types undergo variation and development under specific conditions. It will flourish in one age and decline in another, as do the drama and the lyric, although, like them, the essay represents a certain permanent mood which never goes wholly out of fashion.


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Rh THE CRITICAL ESSAY

The reader who is interested in literary criticism will soon find that the essay has been a particularly convenient form for conveying literary theories from one mind or age to another. The "critical essay," while conforming in general to the flexible laws of "the essay," is used for a specific purpose. It deals with the emergence, continuance, and disappearance of critical opinions; it records, in an informal but none the less effective manner, the judgment of Europe upon books. Let us take a specific example. Charles Lamb's "Essay on the Tragedies of Shakespeare" is a singularly perfect specimen of "the essay" type. It is personal and casual. It opens with the sentence: "Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick"; and then Lamb passes, with apparent artlessness, from the affectations and tricks of actors to the profound question of the possibility of an adequate representation of the personalities of Hamlet and Lear upon the stage. This personal essay, with its odd whims and fancies, deepens page by page into a masterly critical essay, which makes a distinct phase of the attitude of the English mind toward England's greatest poet.

In similar fashion, Victor Hugo's preface to his drama "Cromwell" is a capital example of a personal essay—an essay "rampant" in its defense of the author's own literary creed. But that creed as it happens, becomes also the triumphant creed of the young French Romanticists. They rallied around the preface to "Cromwell" as soldiers rally around a flag, and the essay became a concrete embodiment of a new reaction against Classicism, a significant document in the literary history of modern Europe.

NATIONAL CHARACTER IN THE ESSAY

The two essays which have just been mentioned—personal in their immediate character, and yet even more significant as representing doctrines which came to be held by a generation or a school


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242 —may also serve to illustrate a third aspect from which essays may be regarded. One may study them, in chronological order, as successive indications of a national point of view. Thus the English critical essay, in the Elizabethan period, in the seventeenth century, or in any subsequent epoch, reveals the precise extent to which the English mind accepts, modifies, or rejects the main body of European critical doctrine. As affording material for such a chronological study, it is not essential that any particular English critical essay should be marked by personal distinction of style, or by special critical acumen. The undistinguished mass of book reviews, of gossip about writers, about the stage and other forms of contemporary art, is often the most valuable evidence of the instinctive working of the English mind. What does an average bookish Englishman, in a given decade, understand by the words "tragic," "comic," "heroic," "the unities," "wit," "taste," "humor," "Nature"? The historian finds the answer in a thousand casual expressions, each one of which bears the stamp of the period and the race. The Englishman interprets the general laws and phrases of European criticism in terms of his own neighborhood and time, and a collection of English critical essays thus illustrates the traits of the English national character.

THE HISTORY OF THE WORD "ESSAY"

Let us now turn from the broader relations of the essay with criticism, and endeavor to ascertain precisely what the word "essay" means. The older English form of the word is "assay," i. e., a trial or experiment. It is derived, through the French, from a late Latin word "exagium," which means a standard weight, or more precisely, the act of weighing. The word "examine" comes from the same Latin root. As defined by the "Century Dictionary," "essay" means 1, A trial, attempt or endeavor; 2, An experimental trial or test; 3, An assay or test of metal; 4, In literature, a discursive composition concerned with a particular subject, usually shorter and less methodical and finished than a treatise; a short disquisition. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was himself one of the most famous essayists of his day, defines "essay" in his Dictionary as "A loose sally of the mind; an


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Rh irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition." Possibly it was the Doctor's happy word "sally" which suggested to a recent writer, Mr. F. N. Zabriskie, the following excellent definition: "The essay is properly a collection of notes, indicating certain aspects of a subject, or suggesting thoughts concerning it; ... not a formal siege, but a series of assaults, essays or attempts upon it." It is for this reason that Mr. Zabriskie calls the essayist the excursionist of literature, the literary angler, the meditator rather than the thinker; and he points out that the German mind is not adapted to the essay, since the Germans are not satisfied to make mere assaults upon a subject, mere excursions into it; they must go through a subject from end to end and leave it a conquered territory.

THE FIRST MODERN ESSAYISTS

Montaigne, who was the initiator of the modern essay (1580), laid stress upon its essentially autobiographic nature. He confesses that he writes "not to discover things, but to lay open myself." He thinks that an essay should be spontaneous and free from every artificial trammel. It should have the characteristics of open, varied, wide-ranging talk: "I speak unto paper as unto the first man I meet." Lord Bacon, whose first edition of essays appeared in 1597, is more orderly than Montaigne. He masses his material more closely, keeps to his topic, packs his sentences as full as they will hold. He is too austere for the leisurely, personal method of Montaigne; he imparts his concentrated worldly wisdom coolly, almost impassively; he loves the pregnant opening and close. "To write just treatises," he says, "requireth time in the writer and leisure in the reader, which is the cause that hath made me choose to write certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called essays; the word is late, but the thing is ancient. For Seneca's Epistles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but essays—that is, dispersed meditations." And finally, Addison, whose essays sum up the early eighteenth century as completely as Montaigne and Bacon represent the late Renaissance, is quite as explicit as they are in emphasizing the informal character of this type of literature: "When I make choice of a subject that has not been


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244 treated on by others, I throw together my reflections on it without any order or method, so that they may appear rather in the looseness and freedom of an essay, than in the regularity of a set discourse."

THE ANTIQUITY OF THE ESSAY

"The thing is ancient"; there is no doubt of that. Analogies to the mood of the modern essay and to its urbane, free, flexible methods of discussion, may be found in the "Dialogues" of Plato, in the "Lives" and "Morals" of Plutarch, in the letters of Cicero, Horace, and the younger Pliny, in the gossipy "Attic Nights" of Aulus Gellius, in the talks of Epictetus, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. There is nothing new under the sun; and there were Greek and Roman gentlemen quite as capable as Montaigne of writing with frankness, ease, quaintness, and an open-minded attitude of skeptical inquiry. But though they often revealed the spirit of the modern essayist, they were groping uncertainly after the appropriate literary form. Montaigne's great achievement was to hazard his fortunes in an unsurpassed series of "sallies," "assaults," "assays" upon a hundred entrenched topics, and always to come bravely off—so that his tactics became the model for all literary skirmishes. To think and feel and write like Montaigne was to produce the modern essay. Without his example, it is doubtful if we should have had the essays of Lamb, of Emerson, and of Stevenson.

EFFECT OF THE RENAISSANCE ON THE ESSAY

Supporting the whole theory and practice of Montaigne, undoubtedly, stood the Renaissance itself. This "re-birth" of the human mind, this new awakening of vital energies and intellectual powers, involved a new way of looking at the world. Nothing seemed quite the same as it had been. Church and empire and feudal system were apparently weakening; new nationalities, new languages were to be reckoned with; new continents were explored, new inventions altered the face of daily life; a new intellectual confidence, inquiry, criticism, supplanted the mediæval obedience to authority. There


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Rh was a new "weighing," "assaying" of all things. The actual world was changing before men's eyes, and the inner world changed no less. There was universal curiosity about individual capacities and opinions, experiences and tastes. The whole "undulating and various" scheme of things—to use a favorite expression of Montaigne—was a direct provocative of the essay state of mind; and the essay form, in turn, in its looseness, vagueness, and range, was singularly adapted to the intellectual spirit of the period.

THE BOOKISH ESSAY

One type of Renaissance essay, for example, concerned itself with a casual survey of the fragments of the classical and mediæval world. Modern books like Taylor's "Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages," and "The Mediæval Mind," Einstein's "Italian Renaissance in England," Sir Sidney Lee's "French Renaissance in England," Spingarn's "Literary Criticism in the Renaissance," and Saintsbury's "History of Criticism" set before us, with abundance of detail, the kind and extent of knowledge of the past which was possessed by Renaissance essayists. Caxton's naïve Prologues and Epilogues to the popular classical and mediæval books which he issued in English, Sir Philip Sidney's chivalrous "Defense of Poesy," and Edmund Spenser's explanation to Sir Walter Raleigh of the purpose of "The Faerie Queene" are good illustrations of the attitude of typical Englishmen toward the imaginative life of the past. Gregory Smith's collection of "Elizabethan Critical Essays" affords a fairly complete view of the critical ideas which sixteenth-century England had inherited from Europe. The evolution of the English critical essay, during the three hundred years which have elapsed since then, is mainly the story of the preservation of these ideas and their modification or transformation under the successive impacts of new intellectual forces, and of differing social and literary conditions.

THE ESSAY AS EXPRESSIVE OF CURIOSITY ABOUT LIFE

Another type of essay, originating in the Renaissance, and a favorite with Montaigne, deals not so much with books as with life itself. The new culture, the novel intellectual perceptions, altered


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246 at once the accepted theories of man's duty and destiny. Montaigne does not dogmatize about these matters: he asks questions, he suggests possible answers. The speculative essay, the philosophical and scientific essay, the social essay which draws its materials from the ever-renewed revelation of the actual life of man, all find their source in an awakened curiosity. The enthusiasm, the gusto, with which sixteenth-century men discussed every topic within their range of vision, has remained an integral element of the effective essay. A man may set himself sadly and grimly to work upon his formal treatise, and write it through to the end with disillusion in his soul. But the born essayist, though knowing well enough that his raids into unconquered territory must be merely a perpetual series of sallies and retreats, nevertheless advances gayly to the assault. Like Lamb and Stevenson, he preaches without being a preacher; like Huxley and Tyndall, he teaches when he means only to inform; so communicable and infectious is this gift of curiosity about life.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

There is a third type of essay, originating in the Renaissance emphasis upon individualism, and confidently asserting itself upon the pages of Montaigne, Addison, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Emerson, Thoreau, and a hundred other men. It is the autobiographic, "egotistic" essay—in which there is rarely any insolence of egotism, but only an insatiable curiosity about oneself, and an entire willingness to discuss that question in public. If you like the man who is talking, this kind of essay is the most delightful of all. But it betrays a great deal, and like lyric verse—the most intensely personalized mode of poetry—it sometimes betrays too much. When the right balance is struck between openness and conceit, or when, as with Emerson, the man is sweet and sound to the core, the self-revealing essay justifies itself. Indeed, it is thought by some critics that the subjective or lyrical quality of the essay is a part of its essential character. Thus Professor A. C. Bradley has asserted: "Brevity, simplicity, and singleness of presentation; the strong play


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Rh of personality, the subjective charm, the delicate touch, the limited range of theme and of treatment, and the ordered beauty through exclusion of all disordered moods and fiercer passions—these flow directly from the presence and dominance of the lyrical element, and these are the constant features of the Essay."

One should add, perhaps, that all three of the essay types here touched upon—the "critical," the "ethical" or "philosophic," and the "personal"—were strongly colored during the Renaissance, as they have been at intervals ever since, by the spirit of nationalism. French criticism, in the sixteenth century as in the nineteenth, is very French. English criticism, in Dryden and Arnold, is very English; the moralizing of Milton's tractates and of Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," the personal assertiveness of Thoreau's essay on "Walking," and Lowell's essay on "Democracy" bear the unmistakable accents of England and of America. Blood tells, in the essay as elsewhere.

ESSAYS AS HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS

In fact, one of the most interesting studies made available through The Harvard Classics is the survey of various national moods in successive historical periods. Take, for instance, the English essayists of the eighteenth century. Here are characteristic utterances of men so differently yet richly endowed as Addison and Swift, Steele and Defoe, Sidney and Samuel Johnson, Hume and Burke, yet the student of the eighteenth century, whether he is reading Hume or Burke on Taste, or Johnson explaining the plan of his great Dictionary, Defoe's ironical scheme for ridding the world of Dissenters, or Addison's delicately sentimental musings in Westminster Abbey, detects, beneath all the differences in style and varieties of personal opinion, the unmistakable traits of race, nation, and period. These essays are thus historical documents of high importance. One understands better, for reading them, the England of Marlborough and of Walpole, the England of the Pitts and the four Georges. Any one century, as Carlyle said long ago, is the lineal descendant of all the preceding centuries, and an intelligent reading of the English


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248 essays of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is one of the best ways of learning that significant lesson.

ARISTOTLE AND THE CRITICAL ESSAY

Even if the reader of these essays has no special knowledge of English history, and has hitherto paid but little attention to the influence of one school of thought upon its successors, he cannot help discovering one difference between what we have called "the essay" and its more specialized form "the critical essay." "The essay" moves in a circle. Its orbit tends to return perpetually upon itself. One may even say that the type was already complete in Montaigne, and that since then it has made no real advance; that we have only a succession of essayists, doing, of course with infinite personal varieties of pattern, precisely what Montaigne showed them how to do. But the critical essay advances, albeit by zigzag lines. It is obliged to tack, as the winds of doctrine shift and the tides of opinion ebb and flow, yet it is always steering, and not merely drifting. Take, for example, the most famous critical essay of the Greeks, the "Poetics" of Aristotle. It is an attempt to establish certain fundamental principles of æsthetic criticism, such as the laws of epic poetry and the nature of tragedy. It analyzed the structure of contemporary works of literary art, tested the psychological effect of poem and play upon the mind of the reader and spectator, and laid down some shrewd rules for the guidance of poets. It is an essay rather than an exhaustive treatise, but it is by no means the sort of essay which Montaigne would have written had he been a Greek. It is impersonal, analytical, scientific. And so logical is its matter, so penetrating its insight, that it became a model of sound critical procedure.

The "rules" of Aristotle, based as they were upon the facts of human nature and the character of the literature of his day, deserved the reverence with which they were treated by the men who rediscovered them in the Renaissance. Trouble came only when the attempt was made to apply them rigidly and mechanically to poems and dramas of a type different from anything that Aristotle had known. Yet out of this very confusion and necessity for readjustment came the "critical essay" as we know it. Aristotle had set up


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Rh Truth as his beacon mark: Truth to the physical and psychological facts, to the laws of beauty which are also laws of the mind. When the critics of the Renaissance and of the age of Neo-Classicism in France and England, confronted as they were by new facts, tried loyally to adjust the Aristotelian formulae to the writings of Tasso, Shakespeare, and Molière, they made queer work of it. They endeavored to keep in mind both "the polestar of the ancients" and the "rules of the French stage among the moderns," to say nothing of the cross currents of actual contemporary fact. It was a difficult course to sail, and it is no wonder that the history of the critical essay exhibits every variety of daring or faltering seamanship. But the beacon mark of Truth was there all the while, and though no navigator has ever succeeded in beating quite up to it, it is reward enough for the critical essayist if he seems to be making headway.

CRITICAL TRADITION AND THE ESSAY

The writer of the critical essay, in short, finds that his course has been laid out for him by the very nature of the task which he has undertaken. The mere essayist, as we have seen, can sail in a circle, starting and ending with his own fancies; but the man who uses the essay as the vehicle of criticism must use chart and compass; must proceed from a given starting point to a definite point of arrival. And he cannot do this if he is ignorant of the efforts of his predecessors, and unaware of the general aims and methods of critical procedure. If he is writing, for instance, on the theory of poetry, he does not wish to leave the matter where he found it: he desires to make, if he can, a contribution to that branch of human knowledge. But he is not likely to succeed unless he has a tolerably clear notion of just how far the world-old discussion has proceeded at the point where he himself takes up the debate. When Horace wrote that clever versified essay on the poet's art, an essay which has been irreverently termed "the business man's guide to poetry," he had no intention of slavishly imitating the rules of the Greek theorists. But after all, his father had sent him to a Greek University, and the ghosts of his old professors were peeping over his shoulders as he wrote. And when, long afterward, the Italian Vida and the Frenchman Boileau came to write their own verse essays on


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250 the same topic, the ghost of the clever Roman held their pens. Sidney and Shelley, in composing their eloquent Defences of Poetry, had probably no conscious thought of continuing the formal discussion of poetic theory which the Greeks began and the Renaissance resuscitated; nevertheless, their confessions of faith in poetry form an essential chapter in the evolution of criticism. So with the prefaces of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Walt Whitman. These men are innovators in theory and practice of their craft, but, like most of the successful innovators and "modernists" in art, they possessed a fairly accurate knowledge of the ancient defenses which they were trying to carry by assault. Yet these assaults, no matter how brilliant, never really end the siege. The final truth escapes complete analysis and definition. The history of the critical essay shows only a series of approximations, a record of endeavors which must be constantly renewed.

TYPES OF CRITICISM

Out of all this variety of effort, however, three tendencies of criticism emerge. They are usually called the "judicial," the "interpretative," and the "impressionistic." The theoretical distinction between these tendencies of criticism is clear enough. "Judicial" criticism passes judgment upon established facts. It deals primarily with rules, with the "canons" of criticism, although it may, of course, examine the principles upon which these rules are based. Its estimates are likely to be dogmatic and magisterial. It says bluntly, in the voice of Jeffrey, that Wordsworth's "Excursion" "will never do"; that his "White Doe of Rylstone" is "the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume." It declares, with Professor Churton Collins, that "Criticism is to literature what legislation and government are to states." The aim of "interpretative" criticism, on the other hand, is not so much to pass judgment upon a specific work, as to explain it. It seeks and establishes, if possible, correct texts; it makes clear the biographical and historical facts essential to an understanding of the work in question. It finds and reveals the meaning and beauty there contained. It points out the ethical and social significance of the literary product. To


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Rh explain a book, no doubt, is often tantamount to judging it; for if the book be demonstrated to be full of corruption, that is the most effective way of declaring it a corrupt book. Nevertheless, the object of the "interpretative" or "appreciative" critic is primarily expository, and he prefers that the reader himself should pass ultimate judgment, in the light of the exposition which has been made. He puts the needful facts before the jury, and then rests his case. Sainte-Beuve is a master of this sort of criticism, as Jeffrey is of the magisterial. The "impressionistic" critic, finally, does not concern himself overmuch with the canons. He leaves "universal considerations" and "the common sense of most" to his rivals. Textual criticism bores him. The examination of principles strikes him as too "scientific," the massing of biographical and historical details seems to him the work of the historian rather than the critic. He deals frankly in his own "impressions," his personal preferences, the adventures of his soul in the presence of masterpieces. He translates the sensations and emotions which he has experienced in his contact with books into symbols borrowed from all the other arts and from the inexhaustible stores of natural beauty. His rivals may call him a man of caprice rather than a man of taste, but they cannot really confute him, for such are the infinitely varied modes of physical and psychological reaction to the presence of the beautiful, that nobody knows exactly how the other man feels. We must take his word for it, and the words of impressionistic criticism have often been uttered with an exquisite delicacy and freshness and radiance that make all other types of literary criticism seem for the moment mere cold and formal pedantries.

THE UNION AND MERGING OF TYPES OF CRITICISM

So much for the theoretical distinction between the three tendencies. But no one can read many pages of the masters of modern criticism without becoming aware that all three tendencies frequently reveal themselves in the same man, and even in the same essay. Some of the famous "impressionists," like Lamb, Stevenson, Lemaître, and Anatole France, know a great deal more about the "canons" than they wish at the moment to confess. They play so skillfully with the


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 OF THE

PRINCIPAL SCIENTIFIC TERMS USED IN THE PRESENT VOLUME.

.—Forms or groups of animals or plants which deviate in important characters from their nearest allies, so as not to be easily included in the same group with them, are said to be aberrant.

(in Optics).—In the refraction of light by a convex lens the rays passing through different parts of the lens are brought to a focus at slightly different distances,- this is called spherical aberration; at the same time the coloured rays are separated by the prismatic action of the lens and likewise brought to a focus at different distances, this is chromatic aberration.

.—Contrary to the general rule.

.—An organ is said to be aborted, when its development has been arrested at a very early stage.

.—Albinos are animals in which the usual colouring matters characteristic of the species have not been produced in the skin and its appendages. Albinism is the state of being an albino.

.—A class of plants including the ordinary seaweeds and the filamentous fresh-water weeds.

.—This term is applied to a peculiar mode of reproduction which prevails among many of the lower animals, in which the egg produces a living form quite different from its parent, but from which the parent-form is reproduced by a process of budding, or by the division of the substance of the first product of the egg.

.—A group of fossil, spiral, chambered shells, allied to the existing pearly nautilus, but having the partitions between the chambers waved in complicated patterns at their junction with the outer wall of the shell.

.—That resemblance of structures which depends upon similarity of function, as in the wings of insects and birds. Such structures are said to be analogous, and to be analogues of each other.

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252 overtones of criticism because they know the fundamental tones so well. Stevenson attempts "scientific" criticism in his essay on "Style," "historical" criticism in his essay on Pepys. Jeffrey occasionally writes "national character" criticism quite in the expository method of Sainte-Beuve. Coleridge and Emerson, Arnold and Ruskin, are too many-sided and richly endowed men to limit their literary essays to any one type of criticism.

The justification of this eclecticism of practice is found, as we have tried to show, in the nature of the essay itself. It is the most sinuous, varied, and individualized of all the forms of prose literature. The moment it begins to deal with critical theory, however, it is obliged to make its reckoning with some one or more of the processes of judgment which have been evolved in the history of the race; it tends then to become "historical," "scientific," "expository," "judicial"; it sails, as we have said, by the chart, instead of in the capricious circle of purely personal preferences. And it is in this relation of "the essay" to "the critical essay" that we discover something of the literary and social significance of essay writing. It meets a need of the individual, and performs at the same time a function for society. The individual reader turns to the essayists for delight, for stimulus, for consolation, for a fortification of the will. Cicero and Montaigne and Thoreau will talk to him about friendship and books and behavior. What more can he ask for? He finds in the essayists, as in the lyric poets, the reflection of his own moods, his own tastes, his own varied contact with experience. In their company, as in the company of every form of art, he becomes intimately aware of the fullness and richness of life. As for society at large, the essayists—and particularly those who have occupied themselves with criticism—have aided in the establishment of standards of judgment. These standards are impersonal and relatively stable. They alter somewhat, it is true, with the progress of civilization, and with the temper of successive historical periods in each of the civilized races of the world. But for any one generation the "norm" exists. The departures from it and the returns to it constitute the æsthetic and intellectual activity of that generation. Expansion and contraction, the study of mankind followed by the study of individual


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 .—A minute animal: generally applied to those visible only by the microscope.

.—A class of worms in which the surface of the body exhibits a more or less distinct division into rings or segments, generally provided with appendages for locomotion and with gills. It includes the ordinary marine worms, the earthworms, and the leeches.

.—Jointed organs appended to the head in insects, Crustacea and centipedes, and not belonging to the mouth.

.—The summits of the stamens of flowers, in which the pollen or fertilising dust is produced.

or Aplacental Mammals.—See Mammalia.

.—Of or belonging to the Archetype, or ideal primitive form upon which all the beings of a group seem to be organised.

.—A great division of the animal kingdom characterised generally by having the surface of the body divided into rings called segments, a greater or less number of which are furnished with jointed legs (such as insects, crustaceans and centipedes).

.—Having the two sides unlike.

.—Arrested in development at a very early age.

.—The genus including the common acorn shells which live in abundance on the rocks of the sea-coast.

.—A class of animals allied to the reptiles, but undergoing a peculiar metamorphosis, in which the young animal is generally aquatic and breathes by gills. (Examples, frogs, toads, and newts.)

.—Large transported blocks of stone generally imbedded in clays or gravel.

.—A class of marine Mollusca, or softbodied animals, furnished with a bivalve shell, attached to submarine objects by a stalk which passes through an aperture in one of the valves, and furnished with fringed arms, by the action of which food is carried to the mouth.

.—Gills or organs for respiration in water.

.—Pertaining to gills or branchiæ.

.—A series of very ancient Palaeozoic rocks, between the Laurentian and the Silurian. Until recently these were regarded as the oldest fossiliferous rocks.

.—The dog-family, including the dog, wolf, fox, jackal, &c.

.—The shell enveloping the anterior part of the body in crustaceans generally; applied also to the hard shelly pieces of the cirripedes.

.—This term is applied to the great formation which includes among other rocks, the coal-measures. It belongs to the oldest, or Palæozoic, system of formations.

.—Of or belonging to the tail.

.—The highest class of the Molluscs or soft-bodied animals, characterised by having the mouth surrounded by a greater or less number of fleshy arms or tentacles, which, in most living species, are furnished with sucking-cups. (Examples, cuttle-fish, nautilus.)

.—An order of Mammalia, including the whales, dolphins, &c.,

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 having the form of the body fish-like, the skin naked, and only the forelimbs developed.

.—An order of reptiles including the turtles, tortoises, &c.

.—An order of crustaceans including the barnacles and acorn-shells. Their young resemble those of many other crustaceans in form; but when mature they are always attached to other objects, either directly or by means of a stalk, and their bodies are enclosed by a calcareous shell composed of several pieces, two of which can open to give issue to a bunch of curled, jointed tentacles, which represent the limbs.

.—The genus of insects including the cochineal. In these the male is a minute, winged fly, and the female generally a motionless, berry-like mass.

.—A case usually of silky material, in which insects are frequently enveloped during the second or resting-stage (pupa) of their existence. The term "cocoon-stage" is here used as equivalent to "pupa-stage."

.—A term applied to those fruits of the Umbelliferæ which have the seed hollowed on the inner face.

.—beetles, an order of insects, having a biting mouth and the first pair of wings more or less horny, forming sheaths for the second pair, and usually meeting in a straight line down the middle of the back.

.—A peculiar organ in the flowers of orchids, in which the stamens, style and stigma (or the reproductive parts) are united.

, or .—Plants in which the inflorescence consists of numerous small flowers (florets) brought together into a dense head, the base of which is enclosed by a common envelope. (Examples, the daisy, dandelion, &c.)

.—The filamentous weeds of fresh water.

.—A rock made up of fragments of rock or pebbles, cemented together by some other material.

.—The second envelope of a flower usually composed of coloured, leaf-like organs (petals), which may be united by their edges either in the basal part or throughout.

.—The normal coincidence of one phenomenon, character, &c., with another.

.—A bunch of flowers in which those springing from the lower part of the flower stalk are supported on long stalks so as to be nearly on a level with the upper ones.

.—The first or seed-leaves of plants.

.—A class of articulated animals, having the skin of the body generally more or less hardened by the deposition of calcareous matter, breathing by means of gills. (Examples, crab, lobster, shrimp, &c.)

.—The old generic term for the beetles known as weevils, characterised by their four-jointed feet, and by the head being produced into a sort of beak, upon the sides of which the antennæ are inserted.

.—Of or belonging to the skin.

.—The wearing down of land by the action of the sea or of meteoric agencies.

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Rh men and women; then a new series of generalizations followed by another series of concrete applications of ideas to life—that is the history of culture. And while "the essay" has from time to time asserted the claims of liberty in all matters of the mind, "the critical essay" has with equal persistence recognized and maintained the claims of authority. One generation needs, no doubt, that its literary skirmishes should fight mainly on the side of freedom, and another generation will need no less that they should rally to the defense of law. There can be little doubt of the primary need of our own generation in America. We shall find most profit in reading those essayists who have a respect for literary standards, who are on the side of law.


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 .—The wearing away of the surface of the land by water.

or formation.—A series of Palæozoic rocks, including the Old Red Sandstone.

.—A class of plants characterised by having two seed-leaves, by the formation of new wood between the bark and the old wood (exogenous growth) and by the reticulation of the veins of the leaves. The parts of the flowers are generally in multiples of five.

.—The separation or discrimination of parts or organs which in simpler forms of life are more or less united.

.—Having two distinct forms.- Dimorphism is the condition of the appearance of the same species under two dissimilar forms.

.—Having the organs of the sexes upon distinct individuals.

.—A peculiar form of greenstone.

.—Of or belonging to the back.

.—A peculiar order of quadrupeds, characterised by the absence of at least the middle incisor (front) teeth in both jaws. (Examples, the sloths and armadillos.)

.—The hardened fore-wings of beetles, serving as sheaths for the membranous hind-wings, which constitute the true organs of flight.

.—The young animal undergoing development within the egg or womb.

.—The study of the development of the embryo.

.—Peculiar to a given locality.

.—A division of the class Crustacea, having all the segments of the body usually distinct, gills attached to the feet or organs of the mouth, and the feet fringed with fine hairs. They are generally of small size.

.—The earliest of the three divisions of the Tertiary epoch of geologists. Rocks of this age contain a small proportion of shells identical with species now living.

.—Insects allied to the May-fly.

.—The totality of the animals naturally inhabiting a certain country or region, or which have lived during a given geological period.

.—The Cat-family.

.—Having become wild from a state of cultivation or domestication.

.—The totality of the plants growing naturally in a country, or during a given geological period.

.—Flowers imperfectly developed in some respects, and collected into a dense spike or head, as in the Grasses, the Dandelion, &c.

.—Of or belonging to the fœtus, or embryo in course of development.

.—A class of animals of very low organisation, and generally of small size, having a jellylike body, from the surface of which delicate filaments can be given off and retracted for the prehension of external objects, and having a calcareous or sandy shell, usually divided into chambers, and perforated with small apertures.

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 .—Containing fossils.

.—Having a faculty of digging. The Fossorial Hymenoptera are a group of wasp-like insects, which burrow in sandy soil to make nests for their young.

(pl. ).—A small band or fold of skin.

(sing. ).—A class of cellular plants, of which mushrooms, toadstools, and moulds, are familiar examples.

.—The forked bone formed by the union of the collar-bones in many birds, such as the common fowl.

.—An order of birds of which the common fowl, turkey, and pheasant, are well-known examples.

.—The genus of birds which includes the common fowl.

.—A swelling or knot from which nerves are given off as from a centre.

.—Fishes covered with peculiar enamelled bony scales. Most of them are extinct.

.—A minute vesicle in the eggs of animals, from which development of the embryo proceeds.

.—A period of great cold and of enormous extension of ice upon the surface of the earth. It is believed that glacial periods have occurred repeatedly during the geological history of the earth, but the term is generally applied to the close of the Tertiary epoch, when nearly the whole of Europe was subjected to an arctic climate.

.—An organ which secretes or separates some peculiar product from the blood or sap of animals or plants.

.—The opening of the windpipe into the oesophagus or gullet.

.—A rock approaching granite in composition, but more or less laminated, and really produced by the alteration of a sedimentary deposit after its consolidation.

.—The so-called wading-birds (storks, cranes, snipes, &c.), which are generally furnished with long legs, bare of feathers above the heel, and have no membranes between the toes.

.—A rock consisting essentially of crystals of felspar and mica in a mass of quartz.

.—The locality in which a plant or animal naturally lives.

.—An order or sub-order of insects, characterised by the possession of a jointed beak or rostrum, and by having the fore-wings horny in the basal portion and membranous at the extremity, where they cross each other. This group includes the various species of bugs.

.—Possessing the organs of both sexes.

.—That relation between parts which results from their development from corresponding embryonic parts, either in different animals, as in the case of the arm of man, the fore-leg of a quadruped, and the wing of a bird; or in the same individual, as in the case of the fore and hind legs in quadrupeds, and the segments or rings and their appendages of which the body of a worm, a centipede, &c., is composed. The latter is called serial homology. The parts which stand in such a relation to each other are said to be homologous, and one such part or organ is

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 called the homologue of the other. In different plants the parts of the flower are homologous, and in general these parts are regarded as homologous with leaves.

.—An order or sub-order of insects having (like the Hemiptera) a jointed beak, but in which the fore-wings are either wholly membranous or wholly leathery, The Cicadæ, frog-hoppers, and Aphides, are well-known examples.

.—The offspring of the union of two distinct species.

.—An order of insects possessing biting jaws and usually four membranous wings in which there are a few veins. Bees and wasps are familiar examples of this group.

.—Excessively developed.

.—A family of hymenopterous insects, the members of which lay their eggs in the bodies or eggs of other insects.

.—The perfect (generally winged) reproductive state of an insect.

.—The aboriginal animal or vegetable inhabitants of a country or region.

.—The mode of arrangement of the flowers of plants.

.—A class of microscopic animalcules, so called from their having originally been observed in infusions of vegetable matters. They consist of a gelatinous material enclosed in a delicate membrane, the whole or part of which is furnished with short vibrating hairs (called cilia), by means of which the animalcules swim through the water or convey the minute particles of their food to the orifice of the mouth.

.—Feeding on insects.

, or .—Those animals which do not possess a backbone or spinal column.

.—Spaces left among the tissues in some of the lower animals and serving in place of vessels for the circulation of the fluids of the body.

.—Furnished with lamellæ or little plates.

(pl. ).—The first condition of an insect at its issuing from the egg, when it is usually in the form of a grub, caterpillar, or maggot.

.—The upper part of the windpipe opening into the gullet.

.—A group of greatly altered and very ancient rocks, which is greatly developed along the course of the St. Laurence, whence the name. It is in these that the earliest known traces of organic bodies have been found.

.—An order of plants represented by the common peas and beans, having an irregular flower in which one petal stands up like a wing, and the stamens and pistil are enclosed in a sheath formed by two other petals. The fruit is a pod (or legume).

.—A group of four-handed animals, distinct from the monkeys and approaching the insectivorous quadrupeds in some of their characters and habits. Its members have the nostrils curved or twisted, and a claw instead of a nail upon the first finger of the hind hands.

.—An order of insects, characterised by the possession of a spiral proboscis, and of four large more or less scaly wings. It includes the well-known Butterflies and Moths.

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 .—Inhabiting the seashore.

.—A marly deposit of recent (Post-Tertiary) date, which occupies a great part of the valley of the Rhine.

.—The higher division of the Crustacea, including the ordinary crabs, lobsters, shrimps, &c., together with the woodlice and sand-hoppers.

.—The highest class of animals, including the ordinary hairy quadrupeds, the whales and man, and characterised by the production of living young which are nourished after birth by milk from the teats (Mammæ, Mammary glands) of the mother. A striking difference in embryonic development has led to the division of this class into two great groups; in one of these, when the embryo has attained a certain stage, a vascular connection, called the placenta, is formed between the embryo and the mother; in the other this is wanting, and the young are produced in a very incomplete state. The former, including the greater part of the class, are called Placental mammals; the latter, or Aplacental mammals, include the marsupials and monotremes (Ornithorhynchus).

.—Having mammæ or teats (see )

, in Insects—The first or uppermost pair of jaws, which are generally solid, horny, biting organs. In birds the term is applied to both jaws with their horny coverings. In quadrupeds the mandible is properly the lower jaw.

.—An order of Mammalia in which the young are born in a very incomplete state of development, and carried by the mother, while sucking, in a ventral pouch (marsupium), such as the kangaroos, opossums, &c. (see ).

, in Insects—The second or lower pair of jaws, which are composed of several joints and furnished with peculiar jointed appendages called palpi, or feelers.

.—The opposite of albinism; an undue development of colouring material in the skin and its appendages.

.—Sedimentary rocks which have undergone alteration, generally by the action of heat, subsequently to their deposition and consolidation.

.—One of the great divisions of the animal kingdom, including those animals which have a soft body, usually furnished with a shell, and in which the nervous ganglia, or centres, present no definite general arrangement. They are generally known under the denomination of "shellfish"; the cuttle-fish, and the common snails, whelks, oysters, mussels, and cockles, may serve as examples of them.

, or .—Plants in which the seed sends up only a single seed-leaf (or cotyledon); characterised by the absence of consecutive layers of wood in the stem (endogenous growth), by the veins of the leaves being generally straight, and by the parts of the flowers being generally in multiples of three. (Examples, grasses, lilies, orchids, palms, &c.)

.—The accumulations of fragments of rock brought down by glaciers.

.—The law of form or structure independent of function.

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