It is the same extravagant idea, _that of a constant progression toward animal perfection_, which has become so popularized in “The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” This author, indeed, has taken a wider and bolder flight than even the French philosopher, M. Lamarck. He brings the rudimentary elements and molecular forms of all creation before him. He expatiates through infinite space, and amidst the original fire-mist of the astral worlds. He finds but one grand law pervading the whole universe of being, operating in the self-same way in the production of planets and suns, as in the germination of insects and animalcules, the life-impregnating principle in the one being only a modification of the aggregating and rotary tendencies that rule in the other—the blind and casual evolution of some agency of a material system, substituted for the creative will of an intelligent ever-active First Cause. “A nucleated vesicle” is the fundamental form of all organization, as nuclei of luminous matter are the sources of the stars; this is the meeting point between the organic and the inorganic, the end of the mineral and beginning of the vegetable and animal kingdoms; whence they start in different directions, but in a general parallelism and analogy. Assuming the vast indefinite periods of the geological epochs to be correct, the author makes great account of time, and the mighty changes which will be produced in the lapse of countless ages, and thus rebuts the argument against his theory that is so obviously furnished from the fixed unaltered characters of organization that have prevailed throughout the entire modern epoch. This he argues is merely a point, an infinitesimal fraction, when compared with the epochs of geology. The eye detects not the changes which all specific forms are slowly but unceasingly undergoing within limited portions of time, even as the nicest instruments cannot always enable the astronomer to note the changes of position among the heavenly bodies. Hence the _appearance_ of so many of the stars as unchangingly fixed in their relations to each other. The whole solar system, too, upon the ground of imperfect unrecording vision, _seems_ to be anchored in one portion of space. And hence likewise the argument against the motion of the earth itself, which so long prevailed, derived from the fact of there being no sensible parallax, and now so easily accounted for by the insignificant smallness of its orbit, as compared with the remoteness of the stars. Limited, in like manner, to the narrow field of observation afforded within the human period, the modifications of species and their transmutations into the higher grades of animals are not appreciable, _because_ its six thousand years are as a moment, in comparison with those incalculable ages of geology which have been concerned in the phenomenon!