to the complete discomfiture of his opponents.

Mr. Darwin, however, was so confident of the truth of his theory respecting man having been evolved from an ascidian tadpole and an old-world monkey, that he boasted that

"The grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development, &c., the rudiments which he retains, and the abnormal reversions to which he is occasionally liable, are facts which cannot be disputed. The great principle of EVOLUTION stands up clear and firm, when these groups of facts are considered in connexion with others; all point to the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common ancestor.... Man is developed from an ovule about the 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals. The embryo itself at a very early period, can hardly be dis

tinguished from other members of the vertebrate kingdom.” *

Darwin appears to have forgotten the judge's sage advice to an enquirer, "Give your opinion, but never give your reason for forming that opinion;" for when he grounds his theory on the fact that the ovule of a dog (much smaller than a small pin's head) and a human ovule are very similar, he appears to be oblivious of the fact that the ovule of a dog always produces a dog, while the human ovule never produces a dog but always a man. Whereas if there existed that perfect resemblance which Darwin fancies he detects between the two, they ought to be capable of producing indifferently dogs or donkeys, monkeys or men! Hence the foremost Palæontologist of the 19th century, whose authority on Natural History stands at a higher elevation than all Mr. Darwin's disciples put together, I refer to Professor OWEN, positively asserts that "the em

*Descent of Man, i. 14.

bryo of man does not pass through the lower forms of animals."

In the same spirit another high authority of the 19th century, Professor Max Müller, in his third Lecture on Darwinism at the Royal Institution, when his special subject was The Relation of Language and Thought, forcibly observed that "as it was impossible for him to say that man has or may have been developed from some lower animal, it seemed to him to be the duty of every friend of truth to resist with all his might the hasty conclusions of the Darwinian school, and to remind its triumphant disciples that nothing is so dangerous to the quiet pursuit of truth as popular applause. As far as we can trace back the footsteps of man, even in the lowest strata of history, we see that the Divine gift of a sound and sober intellect belonged to him from the very first, and the idea of a humanity emerging slowly from the depths of an animal brutality can never be maintained again.”

To the above opinions, so subversive of

Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, I would add the testimony of another eminent authority of that age, in the person of Professor CLERK-MAXWELL, as set forth in his Lecture delivered at Bradford in 1873. "Nothing of EVOLUTION," he declares, "can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for Evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction. . . . Science is incompetent to reason on the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties, when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created."

Such is the answer which the true men of science of the 19th century have made to the unscientific follies and crude speculations of men like Lucretius in ancient times, and Oken in modern, when they taught that the origin of all things was nothing! It is scarcely necessary to say that Mr. Darwin never lent his countenance to

such puerile vanities as these; though many of his unworthy disciples, who traded upon his great name, played sufficient pranks about matter and the power of atoms enough to make angels weep at the degradation to which they would fain reduce man, made after the image and likeness of God!

Hence a noted German Atheist, of the name of Dr. Louis Büchner, who claims to have published views identical with those of Darwin seven years before The Origin of Species saw the light,* declares with equal confidence and candour, that such opinions "are perfectly irreconcilable with the idea of a personal Almighty Creative power, which could not have adopted such a slow and gradual labour, and have rendered itself dependent upon the natural phases of the development of the earth."+

Although Darwin has not the Atheistic

*See Appendix I.

+ Kraft und Stoff, "Force and Matter," p. 84.