Like an honorable rural member of our General Court, who sat silent until, near the close of a long session, a bill requiring all swine at large to wear pokes was introduced, when he claimed the privilege of addressing the house, on the proper ground that he had been "brought up among the pigs, and knew all about them,"-so we were brought up among cows and cabbages and the lowing of cattle, the cackling of hens, and the cooing of pigeons were sounds native and pleasant to our ears. Here the author takes us directly to the barn-yard and the kitchen-garden. Well, we found no cause of quarrel with the first chapter. We took it up, like our neighbors, and, as was natural, in a somewhat captious frame of mind. Still, not to lag behind the rest of the world, we read the book in which the new theory is promulgated. Foreseeing, yet deprecating, the coming time of trouble, we still hoped, that, with some repairs and make-shifts, the old views might last out our days. For, dim as our conception must needs be as to what such oracular and grandiloquent phrases might really mean, we felt confident that they presaged no good to old beliefs. Now and then we encountered a sentence, like Professor Owen's "axiom of the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things," which haunted us like an apparition. Investigations about the succession of species in time, and their actual geographical distribution over the earth's surface, were leading up from all sides and in various ways to the question of their origin. The scientific reading in which we indulge as a relaxation from severer studies had raised dim forebodings. We were not wholly unprepared for it, as many of our contemporaries seem to have been. Such being our habitual state of mind, it may well be believed that the perusal of the new book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" left an uncomfortable impression, in spite of its plausible and winning ways. Wherefore, in Galileo's time, we might have helped to proscribe, or to burn had he been stubborn enough to warrant cremation-even the great pioneer of inductive research although, when we had fairly recovered our composure, and had leisurely excogitated the matter, we might have come to conclude that the new doctrine was better than the old one, after all, at least for those who had nothing to unlearn. New notions and new styles worry us, till we get well used to them, which is only by slow degrees. A new theory, like a new pair of breeches, ("The Atlantic" still affects the older type of nether garment,) is sure to have hardfitting places or even when no particular fault can be found with the article, it oppresses with a sense of general discomfort. We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of clothes. Novelties are enticing to most people: to us they are simply annoying.
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