so thoroughly, in consequence, does the fabric of geological reasoning fall to the ground, that we find ourselves incapacitated from regarding even the bed of common cockle or mussel shells, which we find lying a few feet from the surface on our raised beaches, as of the existing creation at all. Nay, even the human remains of our moors may have belonged, if our principle of relationship in each species be not a true one, to some former creation, cut off from that to which we ourselves belong, by a wide period of death. All palæontological reasoning is at an end forever, if identical species can originate in independent centres, widely separated from each other by periods of time; and if they fail to originate in periods separated by time, how or why in centres separated by space? Let the reader remark further, the bearing of those facts from which this principle of geological reasoning has been derived, on the development hypothesis. We find species restricted to circles and periods; and though stragglers are occasionally found outside the circle in the existing state of things, never are they found beyond their period among the remains of the past. It was profoundly argued by Cuvier, that _life_ could not possibly have had a chemical origin. “In fact,” we find him remarking, “life exercising upon the elements which at every instant form part of the living body, and upon those which it attracts to it, an action contrary to that which would be produced without it by the usual chemical affinities, it is inconsistent to suppose that it can itself be produced by these affinities.” And the phenomena of restriction to circle and period testify to the same effect. Nothing, on the one hand, can be more various in character and aspect than the organized existences of the various circles and periods; nothing more invariable, on the other, than the results of chemical or electrical experiment. And yet, to use almost the words of Cuvier, “we know of no other power in nature capable of reuniting previously separated molecules,” than the electric and the chemical. To these agents, accordingly, all the assertors of the development hypothesis have had recourse for at least the _origination_ of life. Air, water, earth existing as a saline mucus, and an active persistent electricity, are the creative ingredients of Oken. The author of the “Vestiges” is rather less explicit on the subject: he simply refers to the fact, that the “basis of all vegetable and animal substances consists of nucleated cells,—that is, of cells having granules within them;” and states that globules of a resembling character “can be produced in albumen by electricity;” and that though albumen itself has not yet been produced by artificial means,—the only step in the process of creation which is wanting,—it is yet known to be a chemical composition, the mode of whose production may “be any day discovered in the laboratory.” Further, he adopts, as part of the foundation of his