Natural selection not inconsistent with natural theology : a free examination of Darwin's treatise On the origin of species, and of its American reviewers / by Asa Gray.

  • Gray, Asa, 1810-1888.
Date:
1861
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Natural selection not inconsistent with natural theology : a free examination of Darwin's treatise On the origin of species, and of its American reviewers / by Asa Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    naturalists of enlarged views will not fail to infer the principle from the phenomena they investigate, — to perceive that the rule holds, under due qualifications and altered forms, throughout the realm of Nature; although we do not suppose that Nature in the organic world makes no distinct steps, but only short and serial steps, — not infinitely fine gradations, but no long leaps, or few of them. To glance at a few illustrations out of many that present themselves. It would be thought that the distinction between the two organic king- doms was broad and absolute. Plants and animals belong to two very . diffei’ent categories, fulfil opposite offices, and, as to the mass of them, are so unlike that the difficulty of the ordinary observer would be to find points of comparison. Without entering into details, which would fill an article, we may safely say that the difficulty with the naturalist is all the other way, — that all these broad differences vanish one by one as we approach the lower confines of the two kingdoms, and that no absolute distinction whatever is now known between them. It is quite possible that the same organism may be both vegetable and animal, or may be first the one and then the other. If some organisms may be said to be at first vegetables and then animals, others, like the spores and other reproductive bodies of many of the lower Algm, may equally claim to have first a characteristically animal, and then an unequivo- cally vegetable existence. Nor is the gradation restricted to these simple organisms. It appears in general functions, as in that of repro- duction, which is reducible to the same formula in both kingdomsj while it exhibits close approximations in the lower forms; also in a common or similar ground of sensibility in the lowest forms of both, a common faculty of effecting movements tending to a determinate end, traces of which pervade the vegetable kingdom, — while on the other hand, this indefinable principle, this vegetable Animula vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, graduates into the higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sen- sitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and to the other psychi- cal manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is un- doubted, however we may explain it. Again, propagation is of one mode in the higher animals, of two in all plants ; but vegetative propagation, by budding or offshoots, extends through the lower grades of animals. In both kingdoms there may be separation of the offshoots, or indifference in this respect, or continued and organic union with the parent stock ; and this either with essential independence of the offshoots, or with a subordination of these to a common whole ; or finally with such subordination and amalgamation. i j i