Mind and matter : illustrated by considerations on hereditary insanity, and the influence of temperament in the development of the passions / By J.G. Millingen.

  • Millingen, J. G. (John Gideon), 1782-1862.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mind and matter : illustrated by considerations on hereditary insanity, and the influence of temperament in the development of the passions / By J.G. Millingen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    of one species into another—least of all, of the passage, in the course of many generations, from an animal of a more simple to one of a more complex structure. On the contrary^ were it not for the sterility imposed upon monsters, as well as on hybrids in general, the argument to be derived from Tiedmaini's discovery, like that deducible from experiments, respecting hybridity, would be in favour of the successive degeneracy rather than the perfectibility, in the course of ages, of certain classes of organic beings.* Although the strongest analogies cannot sanction our belief that the present race of men are merely a more perfectly transmuted form of another pre- ceding species ; yet, as the study of the natural history of the globe shews us that various species and genera of animals have disappeared, many of which bear no analogy to existing creatures; that it does not appear that any animals inhabited the earth at the time of the creation ; moreover, that the present race of animals did not exist in the earlier periods of the globe's successive forma- tion, and that our species, comparatively speaking, is of recent date, we may be justified in concluding, that as the design of Providence in the gradual progress and development of the world and its inhabitants seems to have been a successive creation of beings, apparently rising above each other to * Lyell's Geology, vol. ii., b. iii., c. iv., p. 441. E