gradual improvement without design elaborated out of an ape; or did that Supreme Power, which all nations believe to be God, make him to be what he is, by intention, design, and creation? If this former supposition be true, then the Metaphor of Natural Selection is omniscient and omnipotent, then must it be acquainted with all the sciences in their very essence, and be able to do all things; for unless we concede that wonderful and elaborate machines can make themselves, then certain it is that some other power must both contrive and construct them. Now this power in the Theory is Natural Selection. It is distinctly called so by Mr Darwin, for he tells us, in speaking of the formation of the eye as an optical instrument, that we are to suppose there is a power, Natural Selection, always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers, and carefully selecting each alteration which may in any way produce a distinctive image,’ &c. (208). This power, therefore, is to all intents and purposes his God; and as he does not allow an act of creation by the interference of divine power, he sets up another to do the work by metaphorical agency.

Now all this is clearly perceived by Sir C. Lyell, and thus acknowledged:

In our attempts to account for the origin of Species, we find ourselves face to face with the working of a law of development of so high an order as to stand nearly in the same relation as the Deity himself to man's finite understanding, a law capable of adding new and powerful causes, such as the moral and intellectual faculties of the human race, to a system of nature which had gone on for millions of years without the intervention of any analogous cause. If we confirm Variation or Natural Selection with such

creational laws, we deify Secondary causes, or immeasurably exaggerate their influence.'

This is plainly stated, and would lead one to suppose that after such an acknowledgment Natural Selection wast to be discarded as inadmissible: not so, however, for the learned author goes on to say :

Yet we ought by no means to undervalue the importance of the step which will have been made, should it ever become highly probable that the past changes of the organic world have been brought about by the subordinate agency of such causes as Variation and Natural Selection. All our advances in the knowledge of Nature have consisted of such steps as these, and we must not be discouraged because greater mysteries remain behind wholly inscrutable to us' (Antiquity, 469).

In other words, if Natural Selection should appear as the probable agent of the changes of the organic world, we must accept it as a great mystery. Now, as the whole bearing of Sir C. Lyell's book on the Antiquity of Man, is to show the reasonableness of Natural Selection, and to speak of it as a marvellous discovery in science, we come to the conclusion that Natural Selection stands in the same relation as the Deity himself to man's finite understanding.'

Thus, then, we are taught that Natural Selection, or 'the sequence of events as observed by us,' is the substitute for the Creator, and that the progress of events, without direction or plan,' is the cause of the existence of all organic beings: or, to condense the whole mystery in one comprehensive formulary,-THE ORGANIC WORLD IS AS IT IS,

BECAUSE IT IS SO.

In the above passage, however, of Sir C. Lyell, we have

two exceptions to make. First, to his statement that our 'advances in the knowledge of Nature have been by such steps as these.' This cannot be admitted for a moment. True Knowledge never made a single step like this; of the Saltatory principle she knows nothing-from close and rigid induction she never leapt to metaphorical language, as a substitute for facts. Bacon never admitted anything like Natural Selection as an augment of science; Kepler, Newton, Herschel, Laplace, Cuvier, Davy, never reasoned through such instrumentality; every branch of science. repudiates a method like this; it must seek its restingplace in the realm of the imagination to which it properly belongs.

Secondly. We object to Variation and Natural Selection being represented as 'subordinate agents.' To what power are they subordinate? The expression obviously insinuates that they are subordinate to that higher power, which must be God. But what God is this? not the Deity of whom we have heard. The deity that created a spore of a sea-weed as the punctum saliens of the organic world, and then left it to itself to elaborate every organized being in the lapse of millions of millions' of ages, is a power of which we know nothing, and which never yet was heard of till expounded to us in the Theology of Mr Darwin-or, if not by him, accepted by Sir C. Lyell. A deity of this sort is more absurd than that of the Epicureans, for they said of

*

It is not clear that Mr Darwin admits the first organic being of his system, the spore, to be a result of creation. He seems rather to leave its origin undetermined, and wisely enough, for as he rejects spontaneous generation, there was but one other alternative in this delicate point of the Theory. In page 515 he quotes the opinion of 'a celebrated divine and writer,' sent to him as a private communication, and this opinion would attribute the first form to an act of creative power; but Mr Darwin does not inform us that he endorses that opinion.

the Gods Magna curant, parva negligunt;' but of this deity we must say 'parva curat magna negligit.' He created the spore of the lowest algæ, and neglected all the rest of the great organic world. He either could not or would not do more than make a spore; after that he retired into darkness and never again was heard of, no, not in the appearance of man, for that was not a design of the creator, but was simply the natural development of an inferior animal.

There can be, then, no admission of the old language in this system, to save appearances. In the dispensation of Natural Selection there is no creation, and, by consequence, there is no creator; or if there be, then he is inferior to an ape, for an ape worked itself into a man, but the creator of this system could only fabricate a spore of a sea-weed, if, indeed, he did as much as that, which is doubtful, and which, if asserted, vitiates the logic of the Theory and militates with its essential principle.

In the preface to the tenth edition of the Principles of Geology, Sir C. Lyell speaks of the times entirely antecedent to the creation of man' (vii. dated Nov. 6, 1866). This may possibly be the use of a language of long habit, to be understood in the general sense of man's appearance; but if it be meant as an expression of the learned author's opinion of that great event, it must be met with a firm protest as most inaccurate, and entirely inadmissible in the system which he has adopted. We know well enough by this time what Natural Selection really is; we have seen that Sir C. Lyell has adopted it and written a book of which one object is to defend it; we have seen what he himself has said of the formation of man, and with all this before us it is evident that in this quarter to talk of the

creation of man is a flagrant abuse of terms. Mr Darwin, without circumlocution, denies that there is a design, in the existence of things, and here he keeps to the logic of his system; nor should any one that adopts it so mar its harmony as to talk of a design: if there is no design there is no designer, and thus the stage is left clear for Natural Selection to work without any interference; but if anything has been created it has been designed, and if man has been created, Natural Selection, either operating slowly or by a long leap,' has not been the agent-and the system 'tenues vanescit in auras.' But it was invented for another object, to get rid of the necessity of 'flashes into existence,' Mr Darwin's words for acts of creation. What, then, has been gained by this elaborate fabric if, after all, it began with one flash which contained in it all other flashes to the end of existence? If man was developed from an ape it was no 'flashing into existence,' it was the natural progress of events fostering and bringing to perfection 'a favoured race.'