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 algae, 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.'

CHAPTER XIII. ·

THE ORGANIC SIMILARITY OF ANIMALS.

THERE is sufficient similarity in the general structure of animals, and of analogy in some of their parts, though in other respects the animals may be widely different in appearance and habits, to convince us that this is not accidental; and, therefore, out of the School of Transmutation, it is said that there is a general plan which, on the whole, is sustained throughout the organic world. This plan seems to have been worked on a type with reference to a future advancement, and this advancement, in the opinion of many great physiologists, pointed towards the coming man, who was to be the crown and consummation of the vertebrated animals.

Agassiz, in his Principles of Zoology, has thus expressed it: There is a manifest progress in the succession of beings on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an increasing similarity of the living fauna and among the vertebrates, especially in their increasing resemblance to But this connection is not the consequence of a direct lineage between the faunas of different ages. is nothing like parental descent connecting them. fishes of the Palæozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Secondary age, nor does man descend

man.

There

The

Iran. His hails which preceded him in the Tertiary -- the ita van they are connected is of a higher Laurt, and their connection is to be

sumessment al in

of tin Creator himself, whose ai ia aloving it to undergo the successive

has pointed out, and in creating differem types of animals which have

Passt & Pay Was 1. trouuet man upon the surface of the earl Ludo ise oni torarás vhich all the animal creazon jus and Coton de Tirs appearance of the first Palo

This is said I substance, also by the illustrious Cuvier; and Professor over has expressed similar sentiments. The rerogatio fa deu exen plar for the vertebrated at itulis process that the knowledge of such a being as man must have existed bela nu appeared. For the Divine mind that passed the archetype also foreknew all its moddations. The archetypal idea was manifested in the deed, moder divers modificaties upon this planet, long prior to the existence of those animal species that actually emplify

As a short Mustration of this y my betic aspect of organic appearances, take the following remarks of Hugh Miller: Of the earliest known vertebrates, the placoidal fi-hes of the upper Silurian rocks, we possess only fragments, which, however, sufficiently indicate that they belonged to fishes furnished with the two pair of fins, now so generally recognized as the homologues of the fore and hinder limbs of quadrupeds.

With the second earliest vertebrates, the ganoid fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, we are more directly acquainted, and know that they exhibited the true typical form—a verte