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.'

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. There is nothing like parental descent connecting them. The fishes of the Palæozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Secondary age, nor does man descend

man.

from the mammals which preceded him in the Tertiary age; the link by which they are connected is of a higher and immaterial nature; and their connection is to be sought in the view of the Creator himself, whose aim in forming the earth, in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which geology has pointed out, and in creating successively all the different types of animals which have passed away, was to introduce man upon the surface of the earth. Man is the end towards which all the animal creation has tended from the first appearance of the first Palæozoic fishes.'

This is said, in substance, also by the illustrious Cuvier; and Professor Owen has expressed similar sentiments. "The recognition of an ideal exemplar for the vertebrated animals proves that the knowledge of such a being as man must have existed before man appeared. For the Divine mind that planned the archetype also foreknew all its modifications. The archetypal idea was manifested in the flesh, under divers modifications upon this planet, long prior to the existence of those animal species that actually exemplify it.

As a short illustration of this prophetic aspect of organic appearances, take the following remarks of Hugh Miller: Of the earliest known vertebrates, the placoidal fishes 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

bral column terminating in a brain-protecting skull, and that in the acanth, celecanth, and dipterian families, they had the limb-like fins. In the upper part of the system, the earliest reptiles have the first-known traces of the typical foot, with its five digits. Higher still, in one of the deposits of the Trias, we are startled by what seems to be the impression of a human hand of an uncouth massive shape, but with thumbs apparently set in opposition, as in man, to the other fingers. We next trace the type upwards among the wonderfully developed reptiles of the Secondary periods. Then among the mammals of the Tertiary ages, higher and yet higher forms appear; the mute prophecies of the coming being will each approach clearer, fuller, more expressive, and at length receive their fulfilment in* the advent of man.'

All this of course is viewed in a very different light by the Transmutationists, with whom it is obviously essential to deny any plan in the general arrangements of the organic world. For if it be conceded that there is a plan, this would necessarily imply a presiding intelligent mind, able to arrange and carry out the plan; whereas the very essence of their system is that all living beings are the result of a non-intelligent sequence of events-of accidental circumstances benefiting and improving favoured' races, and leaving the rest to perish.

All these organic similarities and homologues of parts are with them evidences of descent. If the placoidal fishes of the upper Silurian have fins which were homologues of the fore and hinder limbs of quadrupeds, they interpret this that the fish is the ancestor of the quadruped, and that the quadruped derived his limbs from the fins of

*Testimony of the Rocks.