male and female, arise who continue in a strange manner to produce their own likenesses, and that with such persisting obstinacy that no philosopher has ever been able to detect a trace of a tendency in one kind to become parents of another kind, or even to discover when kinds began to exist.

Of course, if it can be proved that creatures do desire and endeavour to improve themselves and rise above their original status, and if it be also proved that the endeavour is followed, in however slow a manner, by the production of organs and faculties of higher order, man and woman might verily as well have come forth together from the ultimate struggle of the life laid up in the primitive germ as any other kind and pair of creatures. It will, however, be but becoming modesty to wait for the proofs before we commit our reason to the belief of such a theory, even though in the meantime we get the discredit of being charged with prejudice, in consequence of our pre-conceived opinions. But are we not warranted to defend ourselves from the charge of unfairness by venturing at least to ask the question, When human nature was any other nature, or at what period in the past it emerged from the inferior stock, and began to walk erect and to talk with some show of reason about the propria quæ hominibus?

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CHAPTER IV.

CREATION NOT CONFUSION.

Ir man did not begin as man, how could man begin? If there sprang from some reptilian spawn a Protean sort of being that, during long ages of struggle for life, passed through all the various stages of each lower order of animated existence until it emerged at length, through some approximate maternity, into the veritable form of a man with a human mind, we should still be justified in making research for evidences of this strange metempsychosis; and if we did not discover those evidences, we should no more be required to credit the assertion of such a process than to believe the less wondrous transmigration of souls, as taught in Hindoo mythology. But presuming that the Darwinian hypothesis does not assume this system of metamorphosis, what does it assume? If it means that man has not actually passed through an infinite series of transitions, does it mean that one form of being was transmuted by degrees into another form, until ultimately man appeared? Then it becomes a question whether any idea of identity and individuality could be entertained as any part of such theory of transmutations. Trans

mutation implies that something essential and identical passes through certain changes. The idea presupposes the identity of whatever may be thus subjected to mutation in form or appearance. To speak of human nature being transmuted from another nature, as, for instance, by proceeding from the ovum of another creature, is a contradiction in terms and utter nonsense. Identity is in the force that preserves individuality in the midst of apparent changes. Thus our bodies are constantly changing atom by atom, but yet they maintain their individual character. But what is so far true of man's body is in a fuller sense true of the man himself, whatever alteration may take place in his condition; whenever he is conscious, he is conscious of his own personality. But there can be no identity of nature in any respect if all nature is but a series of variations from one kind of creature to another.

If man be derived from an origin neither directly human nor directly divine, but from an ancestry proceeding from primordial mucus up to some anthropoid monkey, who became the first man's mother, then throughout the progress, from the lowest form to the highest, a series of changes must have been effected in some way, either transitional or transmutational. Under this kind of change, or that, there must have been successive periods in the process, when the transmitting form was neither more nor less than a mere intermediate link not to be identified with any kind of creature, neither bird, beast, insect, reptile, fish nor frog, but tending nevertheless to become a man. It is

far easier to understand how the same atoms may have assumed various appearances, for so we may believe the transmutation of lead into gold; but what is neither one thing nor another is nothing.

Without definite natures as well as immutable elements, order, heaven's first law, would yield up all the realms of nature, organic or inorganic, to the ruleless sway of confusion, and chaos would come again, if it ever came except in human theories. Why is there a limit set to the power of combination among the elements? Why are all the dead forces bound by God's own hand to keep their places under the law of equivalent affinities, in lines and classes from which not an atom of deviation is for a moment permitted or possible? Why is this, and yet the developments of life from monads to man left at liberty without specific permanence or power to maintain their distinctive parallels? The question is affirmative of the fact that there never has been, and there never can be, a transgression of the physical laws on which organisation depends. There may indeed be monstrosity by interference, accidental or artificial, with the laws of nature; but the occurrence is exceptional and only proves the rule, for monstrosity, or lusus naturæ, is never permanent. It is only mixture and confusion speedily arrested by the balance of the opposing forces which produced it. The existence of disturbance in nature is thus, so to say, foreseen and provided for; it is always limited and arrested by the permanent laws of nature, which are those of order and consistency.

Therefore we may ransack all the nooks of nature and rummage all the rocks, but shall ever fail to find a single specimen of an organised being, extant or extinct, underived from a kind of being, a species, like itself. The very idea of creation includes the necessity of order which signifies nothing but classification. Thus the varied lines of life may approximate, but can

never cross.

All the natural selections in physiology, as, for instance, that by which the organs, under a vital endowment, select their own materials to live and grow on, obey laws that, being, as before said, interfered with, may produce monstrous admixture and so monstrous development; but as surely as monstrosities result from disturbances of natural processes, so surely they can never be permanently propagated. And on the same principle it would also be impossible that natural selection, either instinctive or organic, should convert even a dove into a pigeon, much less a monkey into a man; nor, indeed, except under the dominance of a fancy wilder than that which produced the metamorphoses of Ovid, would any man imagine that the 'germinal vesicle' of one creature could ever be developed into the form of another. Nature is not a mass of contradictions, but a vast consistory of designs that cannot lose their designations without undoing the work of the Designer. We may be unable to draw a line of demarcation between variation and species, or to follow it where it exists. Species are in great measure undefined by science, but the distinctions of kinds are