For, although no man has lived five hundred years, so as to observe the gradual development of the oak from the acorn in its various stages of progress, yet every man who can survey five hundred yards of an English forest, can see the oak in every stage of its growth, and need have no doubt as to the law of its progressive development.

And so, had there really been such a transmutation of species as is contended for, we might expect to find, somewhere on the vastly extended sea coasts of our islands and continents, some specimens of plants or animals in a state of transition from the lower to the higher forms." We are told, indeed, in answer to this argument, that Mr.Babbage's engine produces numbers according to a certain law up to a particular point, and then, most unexpectedly, perhaps even unaccountably, the law of the series is changed, and the next term exhibits a striking departure from the order previously followed; and so, it is argued, it may be in nature.

Each organism may propagate after its kind for immense periods, so as to give the impression of this being an invariable law; but at a certain stage the order may change, and the next term in the series may differ from all that went before it.

The argument--if it can be called an argument--amounts to this: Mr.Babbage's machine produces a _series of numbers, and of numbers only_, but according to different laws of succession; _ergo_, Nature may produce in the same way, and with similar variations, _different races of plants and animals_.

The argument would have been perfect if the engine had produced _something else than numbers_; if, as Professor Dod supposes, "while watching Mr.
Babbage's machine, presenting to us successive numbers by the revolution of its plates, we should suddenly see one of those plates resolving itself into types, and these types arranging themselves in the order of a page of 'Paradise Lost,' or even of 'The Vestiges of Creation;'-- in such a case, there might have been something in the argument; but even then, the withering question remains, Is there any man in his senses who would not immediately conclude that _some new cause was now at work_ ?" In short, in so far as the _facts of the case_ are concerned, there is not only no known instance either of "spontaneous generation" or of "transmutation of species," but there is not even any natural analogy that can give the theory the slightest aspect of verisimilitude.