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In view of the sound judgment, which is to-day becoming more and more apparent in scientific circles, there is reason to hope that this article of Professor von Wagner will be additional incentive for many naturalists to break completely with Darwinism.
He saw that what naturalists call a species differs from what naturalists call a variety, merely in the way of being a little more distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congeners elsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms by which in many cases one species after another merges into the next on either side of it.
I am now quite recovered from my New Guinea voyage and am in good health. I have received letters from Mr. Darwin and Dr. Hooker, two of the most eminent naturalists in England, which has highly gratified me. I sent Mr. Darwin an essay on a subject on which he is now writing a great work. He showed it to Dr.
Many stories used to be told of the way in which it would change colour, not exactly by blushing like a human creature, but by becoming green, yellow, and even black when angry or calm, or when in sunshine or shade; but naturalists who have kept a careful watch upon it do not believe that all that has been said about this is true.
It is also very rare to find any fossil skeletons of quadrupeds in any degree approaching to a complete state, as the strata for the most part only contain separate bones, scattered confusedly and almost always broken and reduced to fragments, which are the only means left to naturalists for ascertaining the species or genera to which they have belonged.
So that naturalists in this matter, as the children say, don't count: their universal thirst for knowledge will prompt them to drink anything, down even to consommé of quaternary cave-bear.
Johnson and an Irish gentleman got into a dispute concerning the cause of some part of mankind being black. This matter has been much canvassed among naturalists, but has never been brought to any certain issue. What the Irishman said is totally obliterated from my mind; but I remember that he became very warm and intemperate in his expressions; upon which Johnson rose, and quietly walked away.
The demesne is a sylvan sanctuary for the wild creatures of the air and the wood, and they congregate here almost as they did at Walton Hall in the days of that most delightful of naturalists and travellers, whose adventurous gallop on the back of a cayman was the delight of all English-reading children forty years ago, or as they do now at Gosford.
Taking the practice of the ablest naturalists in discriminating Genera as a guide in our estimation of their true nature, we must, nevertheless, remember that even now, while their classifications of the more comprehensive groups usually agree, they differ greatly in their limitation of Genera, so that the Genera of some authors correspond to the Families of others, and vice versa.
I would commend it to the deep and serious study of naturalists, botanists, or to those philosophers who should preside over the department of investigation to which the subject legitimately belongs. I will only say what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. Here, I repeat, was a large field of heavy grain, ready for harvest.