PREFACE. THERE is no doubt that a great diversity of opinion respecting the doctrine of Evolution has been entertained by many eminent men for many ages. The Book of Jobwhich is probably the oldest book in the world, or as old as the Prisse papyrus in the Louvre, which claims an antiquity of 4000 years may be dated about 2000 B.C. from the internal evidence, which speaks of the Pyramids (rendered in our English Bible as "desolate places," Job iii. 14) as the burial places of kings; and Egyptology teaches us that the practice of utilising Pyramids in that way ended with the sixth dynasty, which terminated some time before Abraham went down to Egypt. According to some Job is supposed to speak of one of our ancestors of the quadrupedal order when he says, "Vain man would be wise, though man be born a wild ass's colt" (ch. xi. 12). The Authorized Version introduces the word "like," but it is not in the original; and therefore we must accept the teaching of the Hebrew, which shows that man is born "a wild ass," and therefore supports the Darwinian theory; though many will confidently assert that another explanation or interpretation is possible and more probable. Thus the illustrious author of Hamlet, by whatever name he is called, writing between three and four thousand years after Job, puts into the mouth of Ophelia this wise sentiment-"We know what we are; but know not what we may be." But this seems to be contradicted by another eminent man of our own time, as Thomas Carlyle relates how John Sterling taught as follows "I affirm we do know whence we come, and whither we go." Which idea has been capped by another notability of the 19th century, the late Lord Beaconsfield, who in the best of his novels, entitled Tancred (Anthony Trollope classes Thackeray as the best of that style of writers, and Disraeli as the worst), puts into the mouth of one of his ideal characters—a blue-stocking lady—the following Darwinian dictum-"We were fishes, we shall be crows; we had fins, we may have wings." This, however, has been plainly contradicted by one of the most eminent savans of modern times, the very learned Agassiz, an honour and an ornament to the land both of his birth and adoption, who declares that the Transmutation theory of one species to another is "wholly without foundation in fact." And so in his Travels in Brazil, when speaking of the Evolution hypothesis, he very plainly declares that "The theory is a scientific blunder; untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and ruinous in its tendency." Who shall decide when doctors differ so much, as we have already seen by a reference to the opinions expressed by certain notabilities of various ages, from Job to Agassiz, embracing the tolerably |