adultery: he say the injurious effect of breeding by buds alone, and instances disease of the potato as such a result; yet on most of these paints he has been left far behind by the observations of his gifted and laborious descendant. He explains the similitude of the flowers of Ophrys apifera to the bee, us designed to keep olf the insect, the latter supposing that the flower is already appropriated. He was the first to point cut the many close analogies of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. He studied climbing-plants, bulbs, and buds, and the affects of grafts on the stock; and he alludes to the admixture of parts of two kinds of fruit in one. He notices the irritability of the leaves and their glandular hairs in the Drosera, though not from his own observation, and attributes such actions very strangely to vegetable sensation, ideas, and volition.
He considers instinct to be but an imperfect reason—a gradation to mind; that the race of bees is older than man, because the intelligence of the hive bee is unchangeable and arrived at perfection; that the singing of birds is more like artificial language than a naturel expression of passion, as the young bird only learns its song from its parent, or from its own kind. Man has attained his pre-eminence principally by reason of his touch and developed powers of volition, as dwelt upon in our times by Herbert Spencer and Dr. Carpenter. In "Zoonomia" we have an interesting dissertation on Instinct, of seventy-nine pages, rich in fact. (Ed. 3rd, 8vo., 1801, vol. 1, sec. 16.)
He, more or less probably, endeavours to account for the origin of some of our facial or bodily expressions. He supposes that infants acquire the smile from the pleasure of relaxing the facial muscles after the action of suckling, and associates other pleasant feelings, as the sense of beauty, with the remembrance of the fount of infantile enjoyment. His remarks on hereditary acquirements are numerous and worthy of regard. He considers the acquired or inherited love of drink to be the frequent cause of the extinction of families, and of more than half of our chronical diseases; and even in his time, when the poorer classes could less afford to spend money In the pernicious stuff, as the curse of Christendom: like Prometheus, we take fire in our bosom, and sometimes suffer his punishment, even literally as respects the seat of injury. Darwin combated the gout in his own person at the age of forty by totally renouncing fermented drinks, and continued quite free from it till his death, though he was a gourmand in fruit and non-spiritiuous drinks of several sorts. From the hereditary tendency to disease arises the observation that "it is hazardous to marry an heiress."
We think that upon the whole we have now traced in the philosopher of the eighteenth many of the germs of thought which have been developed in the present century. But with respect to these more modern doctrines We say little in this article. Few have been more interested in Mr. Darwin's writings than ourselves, but it is not in us te say bow far his theory is adequate to the requirements, or whether some primus mobile, which the vitalists should supply, is wanting—some doctrine of Life as antecedent to, yet wonderfully influenced by, the simple operation of Natural Selection.
