grown effete, and that she who first created all races of animals and man, now scarcely creates very little animals. According to Lucretius, the concurrence of atoms forming earth, sea, the heavens, the creatures, was a concurrence not directed by intelligence, but a happen, preceded by infinite other chance concursi. In modern scientific dialect, he might have said the world exists and endures as product of natural selection, and survival of the fittest. So we find the Roman Strato Physicus claiming all power is placed in Nature, which contains in itself the causes of generation, increase or diminution, but is wholly devoid of sense.

Thus, without referring to the old Greek "apyn,”—whether regarded earth, water, air, or fire-we get glimpses far back in the depths of time, and down along the centuries of this Proteus. From the middle of the last century to our own day he has been ever taking upon himself new shapes. Maillet, in his Telliamed, published (after his death) in 1750, describes the ocean as "that great and fruitful womb of Nature, in which organization and life first began." He held that the earth was at first wholly covered with water; that the first animals, therefore, were aquatic, were fishes. When the waters retired the fishes underwent metamorphoses. The fishes which kept to the bottom of the waters, creeping amongst the mud, became reptiles, those which occasionally rose above the waters, became flying animals, their fins were turned into wings, their scales into feathers. Mammifers, and man himself, came into existence from this aquatic origin.

Nature, his

Later, by a inward the

Robinet, of the same century, makes what he calls agent. Nature began by creating worms, then insects. bold step, she fabricated crustaceans. Then she placed external plates of the crustaceans, and made vertebræ of them,— thence came the serpent. After the serpent, the lizard; the front part of the lizard was transformed into wings,-thence the bird. And thus progressing, Nature formed the quadrupeds, the quadrumanous animals, and last of all, man.

Buffon (obiit 1788) held that originally there were elementary particles of living matter, viz., animalculæ, whose fortuitous aggregation formed larger animals; larger animals are, therefore, only heaps of animalculæ.

Lamarck (from 1744 to 1829), as Maillet, referred the origin of all terrestrial organisms (man included) to the ocean. "In the water," he says, "Nature has performed, and continues to perform, under favorable circumstances, her direct and spontaneous generations; and there, in the first place, she gives rise to the most

simple animalculæ, from which has proceeded all the animal creation." He derives all animals from a monad, but does not tell us the nature of the monad. Then comes the polypus, out of which, successively, all forms of life have arisen. He held that the exercise of habit and the effort at action is the transforming power,-animals have aimed at certain faculties, and have thus attained them; a process by which they have gradually become new animals. Some kinds of fowl—e. g., by making continuous effort to swim-finally became web-footed; the heron dislikes to plunge into the flood, and drawing itself up when going into the water, has finally become long legged; the wood-pecker likes aphides, and little creatures under the tree bark, and by continuous reaching for them, has become long-billed; so of the long-necked giraffe, reaching up among the tree limbs for its food; and so of all other creatures. Besides habits, he also calls into aid transmutation, "efforts of internal sentiment," "influence of subtile fluids," "acts of organization." "He substitutes," says Lyell, "names for things, and with a disregard to the strict rules of induction, resorts to fictions as ideal as the 'plastic virtue,' and other phantasms of the geologists of the middle ages." The German Professor Oken (ob. 1851) maintained:

There are two kinds of generation in the world, creation proper, and the propagation that is consequent therefrom. No organism has been created of larger size than an infusorial point. No organism is, or ever

has been created, which is not microscopic. Whatever is larger has not been created, but developed. All life is from the sea; man is a child. of the warm and shallow parts of the sea, in the neighborhood of the land.

W. Spencer, Dean of Manchester, England (pub. 1837), held that a single species of each animal was created in an originally highly plastic condition, i. e., with capacity for metamorphoses,-and that these have produced, by intercrossing, all our existing species.

The author of the "Vestiges of Creation" (pub. 1845) claims the basis of all animal and vegetable substances to be nucleated cells, i. e., cells with granules in them. He holds man has risen from these cells of the sea, and regards the dolphin as man's ancestor.

Tremaux (pub. 1865), claims that the soil has created or produced all animals, and has been the cause of their various transformations (for temperature, crossings and food, something is to be allowed). In the recent soils the tendency is toward perfection, in the primitive soils towards degradation. The relative time of transformation was short. Man is from the ape. The ape intellect developed into the

human, by being continually exercised in passing judgment on the elasticity and strength of boughs, as it leaped from limb to limb. Animals have now reached their resting place in development.

The distinguished British anatomist, Owen, claims that the rise of the different species, genera, etc., etc., along the centuries, is the result of a special power with which living organisms were originally endowed by the Creator,-a power under favorable circumstances producing such new forms.

While the name of Alfred Russel Wallace is not to be forgotten as an independent co-propounder of the "natural selection" phase of the development hypothesis, yet the name of Charles Darwin has become so eminent as to overshadow the former name, and stand as cognomen of the present peculiar phase so popular in our day of this Proteus, as Lamarckionism was the cognomen of the peculiar phase worn by the same Proteus thirty years ago. Darwin makes "Natural Selection" the main power in developing the (so-called) varieties, species, genera, etc., of organisms.

I am fully convinced [he says] that species are not immutable, but that those belonging to what are called the same genera, are lineal descendants of some other, and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.

He allows some room for the working of circumstances of condition and sexual selection. He defines natural selection thus:

If variations useful to the being in the great and complex battle for life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations, can we doubt that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel assured that any variation in the least degree injurious, would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call natural selection. . . . As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and, as consequently, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in a manner profitable to itself under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance for surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principles of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

Such are

And thus have arisen new species, new genera, etc. some of the past phases of this Proteus, development,—such its to-day

phase. Let us examine the phase this Proteus presents himself in to-day, Darwinism.

II. Darwinism and Scripture.

"Natural philosophy," says Ewen (Essay on Creation), “causes the world to proceed from the streaming together of atoms, from chemical affinity, from the balancing of the working and counter-working of dead masses, because it has a horror of the spirit that 'brooded over the waters.' This charge can hardly be laid at the door of the Egyptian, deriving all terrestrial life from the earth womb; the Egyptian was a pantheist, and he saw the divinity working and producing in the earth. Nor can this charge be laid at the door of the Greek sages who, for their "apyn," chose earth, water, fire, air, etc.

This word [says Archer Butler] was not the cause of the world, nor yet the final element, but rather that thing which should be assumed to give a rational explanation of the rest. The word "Principle" is, perhaps, nearest to its significancy. The "apzn" was the last term to which the inquirer's analysis brought him.

The "apy," then, of the Greek schools, was not something selected by them as a recession from an infinite cause by them previously known, but was some agent seized upon provisionally as a ou Tw from which they might proceed onward, and by and by attain, as they did, a knowledge of the ultimate Worker.

"

Ewen's charge, doubtless with truth, may be brought against some of the scientists of our day; they seem to delight to ungod the universe, ignore God; they have a decided horror of ascribing anything to the spirit that "brooded over the waters." Tell these men that "chemical affinity" does anything, they are satisfied. So if you say, electricity," "magnetism," "gravitation," "nature (?);" tell them God does anything in the universe, they will tell you you talk like a man belonging to the world's babyhood, a superstitious man; you talk unphilosophically, very unphilosophically, to claim that the Infinite Worker does anything. Yet ask these men what are "chemical affinity," etc., their all-potent workers? They say: "We do not know; we see effects only, the cause eludes us, we must have a name for it, we call it 'chemical affinity,' etc.; if you do not like our name, call it anything but 'God,' and we are with you." For the ordering of the world, the rise of life in it, its continuance, its governance, they make God a mere supernumery, a superstitious figment, which men up with the times must rid themselves of. They claim this is the high fruit of modern scientific method; but on the contrary, it is a mere repetition of the old; the world is ever repeating

itself. The old Hindoo philosopher, Kapila, e. g., rejecting revelation, taking reason for his guide, claimed from a cause not rational, blind, by constant development all are evolved; intelligence in man is an evolved property of material essence, like weight or dimension. Lao-tse, of China,' rejecting revelation, ascribes the rise of all things to an indefinable cause, eternal, impassible; it is the initial principle of life, but it is not God, it has no will, no intelligence. Confucius claimed that "underlying all nature is a principle of cohesion-Taekeih-beyond which thought cannot reach. From this the fundamental and absolute force of nature, undetermined, inconceivable, without intelligence, providence or purpose, all beings animate and inanimate, rise into existence." Had he read Spencer, he might have spoken of the "Inscrutable Cause." Confucius shut God out of his moral system and philosophy, and to this day he has succeeded in shutting him out from the minds of his countrymen. To the men of our day, who are seeking to ungod the universe, and are repeating these old Pagan saying for new things, evolved by recent scientific method and advance of thought, the utterance of Bacon is apposite:

This I do affirm in knowledge of nature, that a little natural philosophy, and the first entrance into it, doth dispose the opinion to atheism; but on the other side, much natural philosophy, and a wading deep into it, will bring back again men's minds to religion; for in the entrance of philosophy, when the second causes, which are next unto the senses, do offer themselves to the mind of man, if it dwell and stay there, it may induce some oblivion of the highest cause; but when a man passeth on farther, and seeth the dependence of causes, and the works of Providence, then, according to the allegory of the poets, he will easily believe that the highest link of nature's chain must needs be tied to the foot of Jupiter's chair.

I do not here charge the excluding of God from the universe upon the two originators of the natural selection phase of the development hypothesis-Darwin and Wallace—but undoubtedly its tendency upon the minds of many sciolists has been in this direction.

Darwin, in his first work propounding his hypothesis, "Origin of Species," distinctly attributes the origin of terrestrial life to God. "One primordial form, into which life was first breathed." Wallace, in his "Natural Selection," distinctly and fully recognizes God's activity. He says, page 368:

It does not seem improbable that all force may be will force, and thus, that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually

1 Fifth century, B. C.