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.

'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 is 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. In 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, say, 'I believe because it is impossible'?

to

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.

6

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

beauteous winged creature results, not from a transmutation but an unfolding, just as a flower is unfolded from a bud. Thus the man of intellect is unfolded from the babe. There is no transmutation, and all the change of taste and mode of life is but a development of the nature once enfolded in its own peculiar ovum; not a development from another nature. The totality of butterfly existence extends from the life-force in the butterfly's egg to the life-force in the full fly, just as the totality of human nature extends from its germ and conception into all it may become in this world or the next; all its evolutions are human and only human.

Now here is an immense extent of development from the same germ. Is it not then possible, say some, that every living thing may have a relationship in common to some particular germ? There are shades and gradations of similarity between the utmost varieties of living forms; therefore may they not all have been developed from one original under the pressure of especial conditions, the struggle of a tendency to live in what form they might, some way or any way? May not different species as well as varieties-and if species, may not genera and classes, may not all forms of life-have resulted from natural selection, from the triumph of a strife to make the best of matters and get the best positions possible to live on, and in the strife and struggle secure, by different endeavours, different endowments, to be propagated to other generations? These questions involve many things-development, evolution, selection, encouraging and discouraging circumstances. The

question is, then, very large; it embraces man and all the world besides.

But common sense perceives no reason for such a large and loose set of questions. first idea of development as the

Taking hold of the fulfilment of a pre

ceding design, and having disposed of that we dispose of all the rest. A thing designed to be a butterfly becomes a butterfly, and a man a man, grub state notwithstanding, for man, too, may have his grub state. Can we discover or imagine that development means anything more than the order in which each living thing reaches its specific maturity, through specific changes, from a specific germ? Speculative science, however, comes in with liberal surmises, and puts a full stop to common sense, by asserting that there is no necessity for supposing the necessity of limits at all, for what produces any variation may produce all varieties in species and kinds, if you give it time enough. In short, this sort of surmising, falsely called science, sees no reason to believe that God created things in their order, but only, at most, breathed life into a primordial life-mucor, in order that order might come out of it in time. So it is nonsense to talk of specific arrangements and parallel lines of life that never cross. The whole of life is, according to this theory, a perpetual motivity of crossings, from man to monads, in consequence of a natural power of selection inherent in every living thing. But common sense still obstinately persists in its own opinion, and says to the man of surmises, Good sir, do you not forget that