many of the forces to which Mr. Darwin re- | stance, self-fertilization takes place fifty times fers the gradual evolution of new forms of while a cross occurs once, we are quite as life, and it is one which we may easily sup- well justified, to say the least, in arguing pose to have come into action at a period that it is a beneficial process because it is the comparatively recent. But when we come to rule, as that it is a pernicious one because it look into the argument more closely, the first is a rule which admits of some few exceptincture of distrust is imparted to our minds tions. Now, in point of fact, if we take the by the fact that, after all, it is but an argu- whole vegetable kingdom, instead of the one ment from "final causes." order of orchids, we shall find that the latter Now, final causes have been looked upon are almost as exceptional in their mode of with some suspicion ever since the time of fertilization, as compared with other plants, Bacon; and it has certainly not been by the as is the bee-ophrys when compared with investigation of them that the chief discov-other orchids. In some cases, as that of the eries of modern days have been made. In barberry, contrivances very much similar to point of fact, in making use of an argument those described in the orchids exist for the of this kind a man leaves everything like firm very purpose of convenient self-fertilization ; ground behind him, and sails out upon an but such instances Mr. Darwin meets by the ocean of uncertainties in which he has neither statement, that if several varieties of barchart nor compass by which to steer. When berry are growing together, it is found that he argues that such a phenomenon must ex- intermediate forms do in fact spring up, thus ist for such a purpose, because there is no proving that mutual fertilization frequently other purpose for which it can exist, it is ob- occurs. Here, again, the same objection vious that his real meaning is, because I seems to lie, namely, that his inference is don't know of any other purpose which it drawn not from the rule but from the excepcan subserve. But since the facts of nature tion. In the instance both of the bee-ophrys which we understand, bear no very large and of the barberry, self-fertilization is the proportion to those of which we are igno-ordinary mode of propogation, and it is thererant, these two propositions do not seem to fore difficult to believe that in the vast series bear any very necessary relation to each other. of past generations from which every existAnd after all, what has Mr. Darwin really ing plant has sprung, there have been any proved? He has shown us that in the greater appreciable proportion of crosses. number of species of one class of plants cer- not here concerned to discuss the bearing of tain arrangements which, on a superficial this matter upon Mr. Darwin's main arguview, would seem intended to bring about ment, viz., the origin of species. It is, perconstant self-fertilization, are found, when haps, possible that the supposition of a cross more closely looked into, to conduce to ex- taking place once in fifty, or once in two actly the contrary result; but it remains hundred times, might satisfy the requireupon his own showing that there are, at least ments of his theory. All which we have to in one species, the bee-ophrys, equally elabo-do is to examine its bearing upon the quesrate contrivances for production of self-fer- tions which he has connected with it in the tilization, as exist in the others for the pre-passage we have cited, and this certainly vention of it. If there were anything nec- seems sufficiently remote. It is surely someessarily pernicious in the process itself, how what unsatisfactory reasoning to say, "It is it that this exceptional case does not become extinct in time, instead of being, as Mr. Darwin admits that it is, the most prolific of our native orchids?, We may admit what he also shows, viz., that occasional intercrosses are also brought about even in this case; but if we take the fact of the rarity of this event, together with that of the prolific character of the plant, it will be hard to arrive at a conclusion therefrom which will satisfy the requirements of Mr. Darwin's theory. If we find that in the bee-orphyrs, for in We are appears necessary in all cases that there should be an occasional interruption to the perpetual series of self-fertilization, in all organic beings, therefore we may believe that a similar occasional intercross is necessary where breeding takes place between two individuals of very near blood relationship, hence we may further infer that such intercrosses should be the rule; and finally, that even an occasional instance of interbreeding between two individuals very slightly related in blood is likely to be productive of serious degeneration in the offspring." Yet this is noticed among the agricultural products in really but a pharaphrase of Mr. Darwin's the Eastern Annexe some magnificent ears of reasoning in the above passage of his work. corn, bearing the somewhat novel title of The difference of degree between the cases is" pedigree wheat," which excited the admiso great as to destroy all analogy between ration of all those interested in such matters them, and render the reasoning which might be sound in the one case totally inapplicable to the other. So great is it, that if, from the mere non-renewal of the blood, any appreciable degeneration took place in the offspring of a marriage of cousins, our finest breeds of sheep and cattle and horses would have long since become the most miserably degenerate beings on the face of the earth, if indeed of them still remained upon it. any In conclusion, we will inquire shortly into the evidence which has been afforded by certain experiments recently made upon the growth of wheat, having for their object its improvement for agricultural purposes, and made, therefore, without any previous bias in favor either of close breeding or of crossing. In pacing through the Great Exhibition of last summer, many of our readers may have Year. except, indeed, the jurors, who left them unnoticed. This wheat was exhibited by Mr. Hallet, of Brighton, who has given its history in the Royal Agricultural Society's Journal, vol. xxii. Part 2. It appears that this gentleman having conceived the notion that careful breeding might produce some of the same advantages in cereals which it has been found to do in cattle and horses, commenced some years ago a series of experiments with the view of carrying out his idea. Having selected one ear of wheat of remarkably fine quality, he sowed the grains separately, at a distance of twelve inches apart. The next year he further selected the one finest ear produced from the former, and treated that in a similar way. The following table gives the result at the end of the fifth year from the original sowing: 1858 Finest ear "Thus," says Mr. Hallett, "by means of | repeated selection alone, the length of the ears has been doubled, their contents nearly trebled, and the tillering power of the seed increased five-fold." By "tillering," we should perhaps mention, is meant the horizontal growth of the wheat-plant, which takes place before the vertical stems are thrown up, and upon the extent of which, therefore, depends in a great degree the number of ears which the single plant produces. Now, there can be no doubt that a great deal of the marvellous improvement shown in the above table is due to the treatment to which Mr. HaNet subjected his wheat; that is to say, to the fact of its being sown singly and apart, so that each plant has been allowed to develop itself fully; but we cannot attribute the whole to this cause. The point in which we are especially in terested is the fact that this wheat was, without any reasonable doubt, close bred throughout the whole of these five generations; and the result has been not deterioration, but most marked improvement. If we consider the structure of the wheat-flower, and the conditions under which it grew in these cases, we cannot entertain a doubt upon this questions. Each individual flower is hermaphro dite, the flowers grow close together in a spike, and the number of stems thrown up from one seed all stand in a mass together. Hence it is hardly possible that the stigma of any one flower should receive pollen from any but either its own anthers or those of another flower on the same plant, which even Mr. Darwin himself admits can hardly be considered as a distinct individual. That Mr. Hallet himself has no doubt upon this point is proved by the following extract from a private letter of his, which we have seen, in | equally unaccounted for by the introduction which he thus answers a question upon this of the hypothesis under discussion. On the subject. As to crossing, I must in theory other hand, the known facts brought to light admit the possibility of its taking place, but have the fullest conviction that practically it has not taken place in my wheat and other cereals." Mr. Hallet had also found that the improvement in the sixth generation has been even greater than in any of the others. Now, though it is true that the result of a trial of six generations does not vouch for that of one of sixty or six hundred, it is still good as far as it goes, and since it has led to a marked and unprecedented improvement in the original stock, it certainly tends to throw doubt upon the opinion that mere close breeding is of itself productive of degeneration. On the whole evidence before us, then, we cannot conclude otherwise than that the very general opinion, that there is some special law of nature which close breeding infringes, is founded rather on a kind of superstition than on any really scientific considerations. If we look upon the question as one of sceienc, we find that the facts given as evidence in favor of this opinion, all except those adduced by Mr. Boudin, can, without difficulty, be reduced under the ordinary laws of inheritance; and even those which he has brought forward, though at present not accounted for by the same laws, cannot be shown to be exemptions to their action, and remain quite by investigation among the lower animals and plants, are such as positively to disprove this hypothesis, as regards them; and it would require much more stringent proof than any one has ever yet attempted to bring forward, in order to justify us in believing that man is under the action of physiological laws differing from those which obtain in the rest of the animal kingdom. The aspect of the question before us from the practical point of view is, however, somewhat different. Here further evidence is still required, and will, no doubt, be collected. It is, of course, conceivable, whether probable or not, that there may exist at the present time in civilized communities, so few families really free from all taint of disease or imperfection, as to render intermarriage of blood relations unsafe by the action of the ordinary laws of inheritance. We are ourselves strongly disposed to disbelieve, in the absence of strict evidence, in any such degenerate condition as the normal state of modern humanity; but it is this point, and nothing further, which observation and statistics are capable of deciding; and in order even to do this, the observations must be more careful and the statistics far more extensive, than any which have yet been recorded. work, it is further said, will appear in a few months, and in two editions-one printed at the imperial printing-offiee, the other at Plon. " THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE AMERICAN QUESTION. THE Journal de Geneve contains the following | You see that measures are pretty well taken from a Paris correspondent: "La Vie de against any information reaching foreign papers César, par Louis Napoleon,' is printing at this a subject of great dread with the author. The moment. There can be no further doubt about it; and I am in possession of information from the imperial printing-office to the effect that a first impression, consisting of one hundred copies, has been struck off, in which the necessary alterations are being made at this time. Workmen have been selected for this purpose who have been employed in the office for many years; and they have been told that on the slightest indiscretion on their part they will lose their places. After the printing of each leaf in quarto every form is secured with three chains and three locks, the keys of which M. Petitin, the director of the printing-office, takes with him. As soon as the printing is completed, the sheets are taken into the emperor's cabinet; then the collaborateurs set to work correcting the press, or altering such passages as the emperor wishes to see re-done. Iliad (Americana) in nuce.-PETER of the North (to PAUL of the South)" Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for life, not by the month or year as I do! You are going straight to hell, you -?" PAUL "Good words, Peter! The risk is my own; I am willing to take the risk. Hire your servants by the month or day, and get straight to heaven; leave me to my own method." PETER" No, I won't. I will beat your brains out first!" (And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet manage it.) T. C. May, 1863. -Macmillan's Magazine. From The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical | introduction of a character well known to all Review. Les Médecins au Temps de Molière-Mœurs, THEY say in France that there are certain people who affect to execrate the medical profession, in order to make believe that they have read Molière. It has certainly been a generally accepted belief that the author of "Le Malade imaginaire" and "L'Amour Médecin " was at bitter feud with the Paris Faculty of Medicine, and that his sharp sallies of wit against. the absurdities once common, but now rare, among professors of the art of healing, sprang from motives of personal hostility to his medical contemporaries. Better knowledge of the time and circumstances has long convinced all who have examined the matter closely, that such was not the case, and we deem the publication of M. Raynaud's interesting book a favorable opportunity of ventilating a question of some interest in medical literature. 66 the audience gave piquancy to these plays. Authors cannot take liberties of this kind without incurring peril, and Molière, notwithstanding the august protection he enjoyed, occasionally suffered for his impudence. The Duc de Feuillade, being generally pointed at as the original of Molière's " Marquis de Tarte à la Crême," avenged himself in a sorry way. Meeting the poet in one of the royal apartments, he saluted him amicably; as Molière bowed in return, the duke seized him by the head, and violently rubbed his fair effeminate face against the metal buttons of the ducal coat, exclaiming, “Tarte à la crême, Molière! Tarte à la crême ! A writer who did not fear to incense dukes and marquises; who braved the wrath of the theological world by his "Tartuffe ; " who incurred the anger of the women by "Les Précieuses ridicules," L'Ecole des Femmes," and "Les Femmes savantes," was not the man to pause in the pursuit of medical men whenever they offered him fair game. Absurdities certainly were not wanting in the profession. Dogmatism in medical science was rampant. The scholastic glosses upon It must be taken for granted that Molière's Hippocrates and Galen had accumulated into Vocation was that of a satirist. Son of an a vast mass of abstractions, which still held upholsterer, and valet to a king who could sway among the faculty. The four elements not but regard with favor so witty and pleas--earth, air, fire, and water; the dry, the ant a servant, the dramatist, while conscious damp, the hot, and the cold; the four buof the inferiority of his position and the su- mors, the nine temperaments-were manipuperiority of his genius, possessed unusual op-lated in syllogisms with a vain, profitless portunities of observing men as they are in the artificial region of a court. The king was not above enjoying the fun of seeing his courtiers and nobles pelted with Molière's ridicule, and even condescended occasionally Molière was no indifferent observer of this to suggest to him new victims. This was no- state of things. For the greater part of his toriously the case with the Marquis de Soye-life he was a martyr to disease. The striking court, for the display of whose oddity and passion for the chase, Molière, at his majesty's desire, added a scene to "Les Fâcheux." Unable, at the very short notice he had received from the king, to get up all the hunting terms necessary for the new scene, the unabashed wit adroitly extracted them from the marquis himself, who was Grand Veneur. Called upon to provide amusement for his royal master, Molière composed the greater number of his plays to set off the splendid fêtes which Louis delighted in giving at Versailles, Fontainbleau, and elsewhere. The subtlety that resulted in mere word-puzzles, more like a complicated algebraical problem than a serious inquiry into matters of life and death. portrait of him hung in the gallery at Dulwich, is expressive of physical pain. He was subject to a convulsive cough, or hiccough, from which nothing but the strictest diet could keep him free. Being a self-indulgent man (a characteristic also expressed in the portrait), and living in the midst of a luxurious court, the restraint imposed upon his appetite is said to have irritated him against the art which was called curative yet failed to cure him. Higher reasons, doubtless, co operated in urging him to the onslaught he made on the prevailing system. His keen intellect, which, be it remembered, had been exercised under the tutorship of the learned | Faculty in France, pedantry and charlatanGassendi, fully sympathized with men who ism, Molière seems to recognize the honesty -like Guy Patin, for instance-led the re- that may accompany the former. Thus, in action which had already commenced against "Le Malade imaginaire," Beralde says to the scholastic pedantry. The force and perennial infatuated Arganfreshness of his wit arises in no small measure from the profound insight into the nature "Your M. Purgon, for example, has no and fitness of things which they exhibit. from the crown of his head to the sole of his pretence about him; he is a doctor all over, This truism, which applies to all writers of foot; a man that believes in his rules more real genius, it is needful to keep before us than in all the demonstrations of mathematdistinctly when we hear Molière described ics, and who thinks a wish to examine them as a mere writer of farces. M. Raynaud has criminal. He sees nothing obscure, doubtful, given a very able, learned, and dispassionate or difficult in medicine, but with an impetuchapter on the medical doctrines of the period osity of prejudice, a rigidity of self-confidence, which his book embraces. He points out prescribes his purges and his bleedings right and a brutality of common sense and reason, specifically what Gassendi did to break and left without one moment's hesitation. through the spider's web of pedantry with You must not take it ill whatever he may do which the schools had obscured the really to you, for he will despatch you with the best great merits of the physicians of antiquity; intentions in the world, and in killing you and he then proceeds to indicate how, and he will only do what he has done for his in what plays, Molière reflects the teaching he would do for himself." wife and children, and what, if need were, of his master in philosophy. As sincere in his hatred of dead formulas, shams, pedantry, and all that belongs to the Tartuffes of science, as any man in our own day, Molière contributed in no inconsiderable degree to the demolition of those idola which stood in the way of the new philosophy. His earliest pieces, performed while he was still roaming the provinces-pieces of which little more than the titles remain to us-show that his mind was then directed to the abuses of science falsely so called. 66 Though Purgon is generally taken for the famous and able Dr. Fagon, the last stinging sentence of our quotation reflects an accusation which Guy Patin makes against Guenaut, physician to the king, of having put to death his wife, daughter, nephew, and two sons-inlaw with his favorite remedy antimony. The amenities of social intercourse were not much observed in the terrible war between antimony and phlebotomy, by which the profession in the seventeenth century was riven asunder. In the "Three Rival Doctors," the "Schoolmaster," and the " Doctor in Love," the same The letters of Guy Patin contain passages peculiarities of contradiction and inconsist- aimed at his brethren, compared with which ency prevailed which were afterwards elabo- the language of Molière is politeness itself. rated in the character of Metaphrastes in the He seems to have been enchanted at the sucDépit amoureux," of Caritides in the cess of the latter, and on hearing of the per"Facheux," of Pancrace in the "Mariage formances in which the court physicians were forcé," and of Vadius in the "Femmes sa- ridiculed, he writes" Thus people laugh at vantes." The one, an outrageous talker those who kill mankind with impunity." proves in an harangue half an hour long, that We remark that Guy Patin only heard of the he knows how to hold his tongue; another play. Etiquette did not then permit grave worries his interlocutor to death by a discus-persons, such as physicians, judges, bishops, sion on the shape of a hat; all of them are to indulge in so frivolous an entertainment as infatuated with their own accumulation of a comedy. unprofitable knowledge, classified, divided, As a pendant to the dramatized pedant and subdivided, and are able on every question to quote the opinion of the ancients, whether in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, yet they show themselves absolutely ignorant of the practical point upon which their opinion is asked. In dealing with the two vices of the then 1070 THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. Purgon, we may here refer to a good example of Molière's treatment of the species quack in the consultation scene of "Monsieur de Pourceaugnac," where the unfortunate hero of the play, being in perfect health, is entrapped into the hands of two practitioners, between whom, once safely seated, he cannot |