As I cannot reprint the various able compositions which I have attempted to answer, it will be fair, to one at least of the writers, to remark that I have personal reason to know that he still retains the opinions of which I attempted to disabuse him. He contrives to reconcile this obduracy to his own intelligence by laying stress on the candid admission made by Darwinians, that the Theory of Development is for the present that which they call it,-a Theory, and not a demonstration. No one pretends to answer fully every objection that has been urged against the Theory. The evidence is as yet incomplete. By its very nature it must perhaps always to some extent remain so. The proof depends in part upon analogy, which leads to conclusions possible or probable, rather than to what is demonstrably certain. But the advocates of the Theory, remembering Bishop Butler's maxim, that 'to us probability is the very guide of life,' endeavour to maintain that their opinions have far more than that minimum of preponderance which, in Butler's view, not only justifies, but imperiously exacts, the adhesion of reasonable beings. Torquay, Feb. 6, 1871. THOMAS R. R. STEBBING. 152 156 1 These papers were read at various dates between February 1869 and January 1871, before the Torquay Natural History Society. 2 Read before the Devonshire Association, July 1870. NOTES to pp. 13 and 34. It has been kindly pointed out to me by Mr. James Parker of Oxford that there is an error in Mr. Darwin's calculation reproduced in page 13 of this volume. Upon the data supplied, the increase in the number of elephants there mentioned would require 750 years instead of 500. The further increase calculated in the same page, would in like manner require seven or eight additional centuries instead of five. Mr. Parker also suggests that the expressions in page 34, 'taken for granted,' 'taught for centuries,' seem to ignore Bishop Stillingfleet and other writers of his time, who saw good reason for believing the Flood in the days of Noah not to have been universal. I am glad to explain that I did not by any means intend to imply that there were no exceptions to the general state of opinion, for I am well aware that there are at the present day some schools, a few nurseries, and even one or two pulpits, into which the truth on this point has been allowed to penetrate. |