adapted. Are there not fixed affinities among living beings? If there are, they cannot create new affinities for themselves, any more than the affinities of chemical substances can rearrange themselves by the transmutation of one element into another, for this would be to lose themselves. Affinity does exist in animals, for every living thing has its proper habitat and propensities. In short, without fixed affinities there could be no order; for affinities result from fixed laws, without which there could not be any such thing as we call nature, for what is the nature of anything but that which the law of its being necessitates? Therefore we say that without fixed law in everything, chaos, if it ever were, would come again. But, if there be such a thing as transmutation, the law which makes any kind of thing what it is must be suspended, that it may admit of change into some other kind of thing. as every single law in nature is but an adaptation or power co-operating with every other law in nature, to suspend one would be to introduce confusion into all; but the Author of nature is not the Author of confusion but of order, that is to say, He is the maker of kinds. Whatever of modification is possible also results from fixed law, which necessarily sets a limit to the modification itself. Whether we can define the limit or not does not affect the argument; a thing modified is still the same thing under other conditions, it keeps its place, so to say; thus, with all the modification of pigeons, cultivated as they are, perforce, under all sorts of artificial selection, the nature of pigeon never so far

But

transgresses its limit of pigeon nature as to be mistaken for even the nearest of its allies-the family of the doves-much less a wren or a raven, a hawk or a heron, a dog or a cat. Reason, then, demands our belief in the existence of an impassable line of demarcation between man's place and the place of apes and monkeys. If the line between them is not impassable, neither man nor monkey has a proper place in nature; and, as two things cannot occupy the same place, so neither can they be changed the one into the other; their very existence implies their keeping apart for ever. But it is folly to talk of natures at all without supposing fixed limits, without which nature itself would be inconceivable, and creation be but an unmeaning word.

On this ground, there must have been a first of every kind. If there were not a first man, whence came we? If the first man, so called, grew out of an ape, there was a point at which he was neither man nor ape. Then what was he? What nature was it that determined the ape to drop itself and become a man, fine by degrees and beautifully less and less like a gorilla? We only extend the difficulty by fancying several stocks of human origin, so many kinds of monkey for so many races of men: the question still recurs, What nature was it that was grafted on the monkey to make the man? The very existence of parentage, being a law of nature, is a sufficient proof that living things were created in kinds. It is true that there are at least a hundred thousand different species of living creatures,

and among them some very nearly approximate to others, but then they are never known to cross, however they may touch the line between them. Everything is possible but such confusion in God's works. Every possible variety of living thing is or has been on the earth, because, in the work of Omnipotence, whatever can be is in fact, but contradiction such as transmutationists conceive can exist only in their own minds, and there only because confusion is there.

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All force is blind, and must be directed. In order to produce certain determinate species and not a kindred one, in order to avoid being lost amid the various paths of metamorphosis and geneagenesis, it iş requisite that even life itself should be placed under the control of something superior. This something is the specific nature of each being that which each plant and animal has received from its ancestors. order to explain organic nature it would be necessary to refer to the origin of all things.'*

* A. De Quatrefage's Metamorphosis of Man and the Lower Animals.

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CHAPTER VIII.

EXTREMES MEET.

THESE are the days of extremes. While one is denying the unity of mankind, and demanding forty or more centres of human origin, with perhaps as many kinds of apes to start from, another asserts the unity of everything, from mites to mammoths. All the old faiths in man's creation, duty, and destiny, with God's especial works in calling forth distinct orders and lines of life in nature, are set aside by men who substitute their own hypothetical creations for those of the Divine Word, as effete delusions; and we are expected to believe in their greater wonders of omnigenous omneity. It seems now that snails, snakes, spiders, lobsters, starfish, black beetles, barnacles, bats, whales, and women, with all their collaterals; creatures that live outside their bones and those that sit within them; vertebrata, crustacea, articulata, radiata, mollusca; are all derived from one original egg, and are only branches of the same stock; the family likeness more especially appearing between men and monkeys.

This is something at least large enough and marvellous enough to exercise the utmost powers of our

believing faculties, and to expand to their widest the eyes of our mind; but is it worth the effort to convince ourselves that we see aright, or rather, with Tertullian, to say, 'I believe because it is impossible'?

But let us see, if possible, how this wonderful creed has been brought about. It is evident that all the forces of nature subserve the grand purpose of maintaining a perpetual succession of beings capable for a limited time of enjoying life, the full capacity of which enjoyment is expressed in the formation of each creature's body. The bodily organisation is in keeping with the nature of each creature, the power of desiring and of fulfilling desire being exactly measured by the form and functions of the body. Thus, the larva of the butterfly has desires fulfilled in its larva state; it then feeds on leaves, but by degrees it undergoes a change both in its form and its aptitudes: it no longer crawls and feasts on garbage; it comes forth with all the attributes of a new creature, it flutters with glittering wings, as if itself a winged flower' amongst the blossoms. It is now endowed with desires in keeping with its new development; it sips nectar held out before its eyes by the All-providing Hand. The tastes and attributes of the butterfly are utterly different from those of the grub, yet it produces eggs or germs that must all pass through the grub state ere developed to that perfection which begins in creeping darkly and ends in floating on the sunbeams.

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But the butterfly was really in the grub and in the aurelia or chrysalis, as every entomologist knows. The