"Ts there anything," asks the Preacher, "whereof it may be said, seo this is new it bath been already of old time, which was before us." This is an age of new books, and of now theories some would add, but in fact these latter, however abundant they may seem to be, are but old friends with new faces, a lengthened series of twice told tales, Albert Smith it was we believe who reade the startling assertion that one never realises what anticipatory plagiarists the great masters of music were until one hears a young lady execute one of her own compositions on the pianoforte. A like remark applies to every branch of science, of literature, and of art. There ie no wow thing under the sun, but unluckily for modern discoverers there is, among men who still retain a reverent familiarity with old books, remembrance of former things, which, when put into shape and submitted to the reading multitude, singularly takes away from the gloss of freshness which we admire alike on hot pressed opinions and speculations as on hot pressed cents and hats, In effect, to a man thoroughly saturated with the literature of past ages there is little or nothing new in the poetry, the philosophy, or the drama of modern times, We speak of course only of the literature to which all educated men possess in a greater or less degree the key, unmely, that of Greece, Rome and France. The assertion may be considered bold, but the wider any man's rending in authors ancient' the more readily will he acknowledge its truth, No one will deny that in modern art the highest flight is merely the most successful quest after the antique spirit, and this in all branches. It is less generally acknowledged that every shade of mo-dorn philosophical speculation has been consciously or unconsciously reproduced fron: thinkers now long out of date. Nor, indeed, is this very wouderfal, for the field covered by legitimate objects of thought, that is to say by ideas that can be represented in consciousness, is by no means unlimited, On every side it is hedged in by the likable, and the ground thus narrowed lias been over and over again '0 the highest pitch of productiveness by men whose names are uried to identify ages of the most violent intellectual activity. Several months ago w writer in these culamms gave brief and popular sketch of the philosophy of Luoretins, and succeeded in establishing amarly remarkable poral. leh-ins between the speculations of the old world Roman who, denied divinely the divine and those of the most advanced thinkers of the present day. The same process might be applied to many another writer of antiquity. Nay, even the brilliant bon mots, which have made the reputation of modern jokers of jokes, are not a fow to be found baried in musty folios, the depositaries. of the wit and wisdom of ages when the world was yet young. But this subject, which is rich in entertainment, must be treated of by itself on a future occasion.
When Darwin gave utterance to b revolutionary doctrines on the Origin of Species ho recounted, with the sert pulous honesty which has always di tinguished his writings, all the opinions that had been expressed by preceding naturalists, so far as he was acquainted with them, which appeared to point to the doctrine wherewith his name has since been associated. Passing over allusions to the subject in classical writers, be attributes to Lamarck the first expression of views nearly coiuei ing with his own. But the definite expression of such views dates from an eatlior period than the beginning of this century, although up to the other day it was buried in neglected mann-script. In the first part, and towards the middle of last cen.ary, Diderot ina work on physiology and in correspondence with his friends protested against the belief in the stability of species. We know no more, said he, what animals have been than what they will be. It is impossible to guess what may be the future organisation of the being slow called man, through what countless metamorphoses he must reach it, and through what inconceivable series of ages such changes may stretch. The chain of life is an unbroken one. The thinking being is the development of the feeling being; this, in its turn in the outcome of the first contractile mass formed from inorganic material, All nature is in a perpetual flax under the influence of eternal inconscient force, cognisable only in its effects and unimaginable in its, essence. And the same ideas wore fermenting in other imaginations about the same time. Benojt do Maillet about 1740 asserted that a primordial germ had given origin to elementary marine organism, from which pavo descended all pist and existent species, even man himself. Here is Darwin's ascidian, And he proceeds to sny that the change of a silk-worm or caterpillar into a moth or n butterfly would be far more dificult primd facie to believe than this, were we not witnesses every day of the phenomenon. The roo of fish borne into marshes might as easily give rise to the first transmigration of species from an aquatic to a terrestrial form, It would matter nothing though a hundred millions should perish; if two only survived the new species would be established. There are periods, says the author of a paper in the Revue des dense Mendes, from which we hive taken the expression of Diderot's views, when an iden is epidemic, This is true enough, but it would be easy to show that the identity in the exposition of an idea that has sprang up contemper. taneously in many minds must be due to something more than accident. Ib may be that we inherit tendencies to various forms of speculative inquiry, which like many inherited bodily pecahorities lie Jatent until a predestined period of lifo or perhaps of race history las been reached. What is certain is that the mind of the human family moves in a wide eternal circle, like phenomena arising at like stages in its orbit.
The origin of lifo from inorganic molecules is a corollary, almost inevitable, to the Darwinian hypothesis. Diderot felt this in regard to his own beliefs. Inexplicable the passage from death to life mast ever be, but analogy helps to represent it to the mind. It seems clear that a stone does wot feel, or at least gives no evidence of feeling, avy more thane weight on a support gives any evidence of having a force shut up within it. Remove, however, the support, and the vis mortua is at once to transformed into vis viva, Fust 50, but under unknown conditions, a latent sensibility in inorganic matter may be exchanged for the. active
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.