DOCTORS AND MEDICINE. On page 159 of this paper we promised our readers the testimony of the most prominent physicians in both this country and Europe concerning the efficacy of their medicine in the cure of disease. The disclosure is startling and speaks for itself: PROFESSOR N. CHAPMAN, late of the University of Pennsylvania, formerly President of the Philadelphia Medical Society, and declared a few years ago to be at the head of the medical profession in America, says, in "Materia Medica," vol. 1, page 3: "Medical conclusions differ very widely from every other species of evidence. We cheat ourselves with a thousand illusions. It is not necessary that I shall enforce this remark by the enumeration of any examples. No one who is conversant with the practice need be told how often his own deductions have proved erroneous, and how little confidence is to be reposed in those pompous recommendations with which medicines are promulgated." On page 33 the same author says: "To trace the multiplied relations of medicine to disease, we at once introduce the spirit of speculation." And again he says, page 32: "This, indeed, is emphatically true, that we can hardly ever pronounce with certainty what will be the exact results from the dose administered. It might gratify our vanity, were it not more than counterbalanced by the humiliating view of so much absurdity, contradiction and falsehood." SIR ASTLEY COOPER, physician to Queen Victoria, has declared: "The science of medicine is founded upon conjecture and improved by murder." What a shocking statement from a man so eminent as to have the royal family in his professional care. PROFESSOR ARMOR, of the Long Island College Hospital, declares, in the New York Medical Journal for January, 1883, that "drugs are administered, patients sometimes recover, and we suppose we have cured them, whereas our remedies have had little or nothing to do with their recovery. Very likely it took place in spite of our drugs." SIR JAMES JOHNSON, formerly editor of the Medical Chirurgical Review, London, says: "I declare, as my conscientious conviction, founded upon long observation and experiment, that if there were not a single physician, surgeon, chemist, druggist or drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality than now prevail." DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES has declared before the Massachusetts Medical Society: "I fairly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." HEALTH WITHOUT MEDICINE. The quotations just made from the highest authorities and representatives of the medical profession show the dangerous and experimental nature of filling the system with their poisonous medicines. Believing implicitly in the truth of the facts set forth by these testimonies, we append a few counter testimonials from thousands which we have on hand from those who have been restored to health by Dr. Hall's Health treatment, which reveals a method of curing disease without Drugs or Medicines of any description : L. F. Churchill, Esq., a lawyer, of Rutherfordtown, N. C., writes, Aug. 24th: "Dr. Hall,-Several months ago I commenced your treatment for chronic dyspepsia, from which I have been a sufferer for a long time. It has had a wonderful effect in the right direction. I send you enclosed $4 for a pamphlet for a friend. Respectfully yours, L. F. Churchill." Wm. J. Hall, Marion Station, Md., writes: "Dr. A. Wilford Hall,-I bought your Health-Pamphlet eight months ago and am so well pleased that I want to act as agent for you in this county. When I began your treatment I was in a precarious condition. Suffering from consumption of the bowels or chronic dysentery. This terrible disease gradually grew worse. Notwithstanding the fact that I received all the medical attention that any man could receive. My weight decreased from 165 pounds to 125 pounds, and my doctor and friends gave up all hope of my recovery. I was at this crisis informed by Dr. J. C. Hummer that there was only one thing to cure me and that was Dr. Hall's Healthment I felt a radical change, and in ten days I was able Treatment. In twenty-four hours after using the treatto attend to business, and in two months I was as healthy a man as lived in the community. I Sincerely and gratefully, Wm. J. Hall." Mr. F. Gorton, of Fenton, Michigan, writes: "Dear Dr. Hall,-Simple justice to you demands that make known my experience with your valuable discovery; I was severely attacked with 'La Grippe and for three weeks was very sick. Your treatment brought me out all right. I took no medicine and when I recovered, I at once felt all right, strong and well, while all others complained of feeling weak and half sick for many days. I am seventy-five years old; I intend to die without making an apothecary shop of my stomach. Many thanks for your valuable and wonderful assistance to nature. "Yours gratefully and fraternally, F. Gorton." C. H. Harmon, of Athena, Oregon, writes: "Dr. Hall,-About eighteen months ago-upon the recommendation of my neighbor, Isaac Blum, in whose family your health method had been satisfactorily tested-I purchased one of your pamphlets. The treat PROF. MAGENDIE, the great French physician, whose experiments and teachings are recorded and scattered over the whole globe, addressed the students at the Paris Medical College in the following language: "Gen-ment has proven a godsend to my family, and especially tlemen, medicine is a great humbug. It is nothing like science. Doctors are mere empirics when they are not charlatans. We are ignorant as men can be. I must tell you frankly that I know nothing about medicines. I repeat to you, there is no such thing as medical science. I grant you people are cured, but how? Nature does a great deal but doctors do devilish little." Think of it; a man so high in the medical profession, as Dr. Magendie is acknowledged to be, lecturing in such style to a class! DR. JAMES MASON GOOD, the noted author, says: "The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon, and the effects of our medicines in the highest degree unsatisfactory, except, indeed, that they have destroyed more lives than war, pestilence and famine combined." How does this sound to the people who have a mania for swallowing medicine? DR. MARTIN PAINE, in his great work, "Institutes of Medicine," page 541, declares: "The most violent poisons are among our best remedies. We do but substitute one morbid action for another." Dr. Paine is authority. He was Professor of Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica in the University of the City of New York, and member of any number of learned societies in Europe and America. DR. HALL, of Hall's Journal of Health, says: "Medicine, even the mildest, is a poison, and effects a result in proportion to its poisonous qualities. It cures by setting up a disease greater than the original which it seeks to cure." Hence the reader can easily see how it is that medicine seems to "cure" the simpler forms of disease, by establishing the more serious ailments, such as heart disease, liver troubles, consumption, kidney disease, dyspepsia, paralysis, spinal trouble, female disorders and the host of other chronic ailments which are acknowledged incurable by any drugs. It is the duty of a doctor to ease a man's pains, and -quietly slip him out of this life into the Great Beyond. to my wife, who, marvelous as it seems, recently gave birth to a large and healthy boy without having suffered a moment's pain, whereas on all previous similar occasions (two) she underwent long and severe labor agony. I take great pleasure in making known this fact. "Yours very truly, C. H. Harmon." fully this drugless remedy, is $4.00, Our Health-Pamphlet, revealing which we agree to refund if treatment is not satisfactory after a month's trial. This shows our faith in results. Write to any of those giving testimonials concerning our reliability and the genuineness of their indorsement, inclosing stamp for reply. PAGE. CONTENTS FOR SEPTEMBER NUMBER. Air-Pulse Formation. (By Prof. A. B. Wood.) With a Reply by the Editor. Can a Vibrating Prong of Heresy. (By Rev. J. I. Swander, D. D.).... a Tuning-Fork Send off an Air-Pulse?.. 145 149 Important Suggestions to Political Economists. (Ed.) 151 The Wilford Hall Sanitarium.-Important Notice.Prof. A. B. Wood's Articles. 152 Suicides-How to Prevent Them. (Editor.). 153 "The Problem of Human Life." (Associate Editor.) -"The Absurdity of Spontaneous Generation." Extract from Reply to Prof. Earnst Haeckel.. Invisible and Immaterial Forms and Forces. (By Isaac Hoffer).. Dr. Swander's New Book. (Associate Editor.)... 154 156 158 159 Doctors and Medicine.-Health Without Medicine.. 160 Our "Extra" MICROCOSM of 16 pages, giving further information and endorsements from prominent persons concerning the Health-Pamphlet, sent FREE upon application. Press of H. B. ELKINS, 13 and 15 Vandewater Street, New York. A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF SUBSTANTIALISM AND COLLATERAL DISCUSSIONS. A. WILFORD HALL, Ph. D., LL. D., Editor and Proprietor. (Author of the "Problem of Human Life," Editor of the Scientific Arena, &c., &c.) Address all communications to A. WILFORD HALL, 23 Park Row, New York. Vol. VIII.-No. 11. OCTOBER, 1891. 50 Cents a Year, Entered as second class matter at the New York Post Office. published arguments in favor of Darwinism, DR. HALL IN GREAT BRITAIN. The editor of this journal has just received notice from London of his unanimous election as a fellow of the Victoria Institute or Philosophical Society of Great Britain, accompanied with an invitation to prepare a special paper on Darwinism or "Direct Creation versus Spontaneous Generation and Natural Selection," to be read before that society. The doctor has accordingly prepared and sent to the Secretary of the Society the following paper to be read for him by his friend Dr. Audsley. ASSOCIATE EDITOR. DIRECT CREATION versus SPONTANEOUS either purposely slur over this essential phase of their master's system of commencing the work of selection, or else they superficially ignore it entirely as too difficult and dangerous a ground upon which to risk their scientific feet. They surely ought to know, should they incautiously adopt the logical conclusion into which their great leader was forced as his only alternative after a life long mental agitation upon that very point, that they at once nullify all their sneers at the "unscientific" doctrine of miraculous or supernatural acts on the part of a personal and intelligent creator for the production of all species as believed and taught by religionists of every school. Darwin was too careful and too logical a GENERATION AND NATURAL SELECTION. student of nature and science to precipitate BY A. WILFORD HALL, Ph. D., LL. D. From our first examination of the "Origin of Species" by the late distinguished Charles Darwin, we have not only doubted but repudiated the logic that would begin organic life on this earth by special acts of creation, and then complete it by "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest." Mr. Darwin distinctly resorts to direct supernatural interposition on the part of the Deity for the origin of the "first few simple forms" of life as a foundation for "natural selection" to begin work upon, well knowing that there can be no selection unless there are two or more things among which or from which to select. To assume that "natural selection" could produce the first simple forms of life thereby to make choice of the fittest to survive, was such a logical absurdity as to force its repudiation and compel the great naturalist to accept the "unscientific" basis of several special acts of creation on the part of an intelligent creator, or else abandon at its very threshold the entire great scheme of the origin of species by "natural selection." There is not a scientific investigator living who has approached this discussion, from the first appearance of the "Origin of Species" to the present time, who is not forced to accept the logic of Mr. Darwin, namely, that at least a few original organisms must necessarily have been created by some supernatual means and placed in the struggle and competition for life on this earth before selection of any kind, natural or artificial, could commence its work as a preparatory step to structural improvement and the survival of the fittest. Evolutionists as a rule, in their lectures and himself into the doctrine of "; spontaneous generation" as a means for securing the "first few simple forms" upon which his law of natural selection could afterward go to work for the development of the higher orders of animate being. Whatever want of logic was displayed by this eminent naturalist in beginning his system of populating the earth by intelligently directed miracles, and ending it by the action of blind and designless laws of selection, he could not be cajoled by the emergencies of his dilemma to choose such an irrational and indefensible basis for his future reputation as that of the origin of sentient beings possessing mental powers, without preexistent life and mind as their cause. He did not dare to risk the future of his masterly book based upon any such defenceless hypothesis as "spontaneous generation out of inorganic matter" for the production even of one living and intelligent animal, possessing all the necessary parts, organs and voluntary faculties fitting it for the struggle for existence and endowed with the capabilities of development into myriad other species of a still higher order. The reason why he did not dare to risk the assumption of such a means of securing the necessary "few simple forms" for natural selection to begin upon, however tempting the idea, was, that the same intelligent laws of nature which possessed sufficient designing and constructing power to convert inorganic matter into his primeval ascidian, for example, and confer upon it the mental faculties required by its environment to enable it to subsist, propagate its kind, and evolve into still higher forms of organic life could, without a logical doubt, so act on similar or other organic matter as to produce a fish, a bird, a quadruped, or a man. Darwin had the sagacity to see that the production. He thus absolutely stops the creation of a perfect horse, for example, with entire process of natural selection at the very all his mental powers, was only the reasonable threshold of creation, which his master, Darextension of the same intelligent processes win, consistently saw could only be started by which were necessary in the natural laws and having at least a “few simple forms" to select forces to construct a moneron with its invisi- among and from in order that any survival of ble parts and organs by which it could thrust the fittest could take place. Hæckel, however, out its pseudopoda or false feet, seek for and in his desperate anxiety to improve upon Dardevour its food, and finally divide its body into win's special-creation hypothesis and thus igtwo living procreating parts, possessing the nominiously rule a God out of the universe, same mental powers of the original. But assumed but one single effective spontaneously while Darwin saw this consistent method of created organism, and then set his little albureasoning and the logical absurdity of adopt-minous "primeval parent” at the incompreing the hypothesis of spontaneous generation hensible task of selecting among itself, to carry to give a start to natural selection, he totally on the struggle for existence and survival of failed to see the same inconsistency in his own the fittest in competition with itself! hypothesis of calling in a personal intelligent If there is any naturalist now extant so deCreator to produce his first few simple forms, ficient in logical powers as to prefer Hæckel's including the "ascidian," which he definitely method of beginning natural selection, the specifies, and not then permitting that same struggle for existence and survival of the fitcreative power to go on and finish the work he test by having but a single spontaneously genhad been absolutely obliged to commence! erated organism to start with, to that of DarDarwin's disciples are therefore the last men win's "few simple forms" specially prepared by on earth to inveigh against the "unscientific" an intelligent "Creator," we confess we should character of the doctrine of the miraculous like to meet him. If there is any man who creation of the species. A "scientific fact" is can conceive of the generation of a sentient, any fact the assumption of which becomes un-intelligent being without at least an equally avoidable under the logical analysis of existing intelligent and sentient generator, we should conditions and circumstances, or in other also like to meet such an intellectual curiosity. words which makes such assumed fact an ab- Yet Prof. Hæckel, according to his "History solute necessity. Darwin was driven to such a of Creation" and his "Evolution of Man," does logical necessity by finding his newly dis- actually believe in an intelligent generation covered law of "natural selection" without without a generator, an ingenious invention materials upon which to begin work until he without an inventor, an intelligent and sentient had first called to its aid the absolutely un-creation without a creator, a work of art withavoidable scientific fact of the direct miraculous production of a few simple organisms by the intervention of a personal, intelligent Creator. This being a scientific necessity for the very commencement of evolution, hence miracles in this case became scientific facts. Let no evolutionist henceforth fling a sneer of contempt at miracles as "unscientific" when no other solution of a problem presents itself. Prof. Hæckel, of the University of Jena and the greatest living apostle of Darwin, in his History of Creation," and "Evolution of Man," resorts to the spontaneous generation of the first living form out of inorganic matter as a strictly "scientific process every way in harmony with that of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, while he mildly ridicules Another thought must not be overlooked, the position of his master, as a weak concession bearing directly upon this point. Keeping in to the church, that anything had ever been mind that it was absolutely necessary, accordcreated miraculously by an intelligent Deity.ing to Darwin's forced admission, in order to Little, however, did the Jena professor real-start natural selection, that a few simple orize that in giving to nature the intelligent de-ganisms should be specially created in order signing power to produce a living, thinking "moneron," which he declares to be the "primeval parent of all other organisms," he had simply made nature itself the very intelligent and personal "Creator" he was ridiculing in Darwin. And while Darwin logically recognized the necessity of the supernatural creation of a "few simple forms" in order that anything like selection could begin, Hæckel entirely and inconsistently overlooked the selfevident necessity of a plurality of diversified organisms in c er to put the law of natural selection int cation, but limited the creative work of his spontaneous god to a single "simple form"-the moneron. 66 He repeats over and over, in his different works, that but one single effective act of spontaneous generation ever took place on this earth, and that but one single organic being was ever thus created capable of organic re out an artist, and in intelligent self-executing laws without an intelligent law-giver. Accepting Darwin's view of the origin of living forms upon this earth, as having taken place by special acts of supernatural creation, as the only scientific basis of evolution by natural selection, we therefore accept the decision of this high authority that a miracle, in every case where it is the only rational explanation of phenomena, must also be regarded as a scientific and demonstrated fact. That a miracle, and even a number of miracles were absolute scientific facts at the commencement of natural selection, and in order to start it into operation is, therefore, conceded by this highest authority on the subject. that this law might have something upon which to operate, is it reasonable or consistent to assume that the all-wise Creator changed a plan that had proved entirely successful at the start, and adopted one to be left to the mere chance of circumstances and environments for completing the great scheme of creation? For an infinite Creator to adopt two plans entirely different for the production of new species. which were to populate this earth, when the simpler of the two plans had proved entirely practicable, is a puerility of which, in ordinary mechanics, no intelligent man could be guilty. No inventor, for example, constructs an ingenious machine and then expects that machine to evolve other inventions even still more complex than itself. He would consider the same ingenuity necessary to produce a new invention that conceived and designed the first, though he might cause an ingeniously constructed machine to turn out a given uniform product ad libitum. Such are the workings of the complex physical laws within an organic species which go on reproducing its individual members, just as a given invention will produce millions of pins exactly alike. But no man ever produced a pin-machine with a capacity to produce other machines capable of turning out needles, screws, tacks, buttons, etc. The reader can make the application. Besides it is just as easy, so far as the human intellect can conceive, for an infinite creator to produce an elephant as an earthworm by direct creative energy. It is only a difference in the number of material or visible parts and their manner of arrangement, since the life and mental powers of the worm are as much an essential emanation from the life and mentality of the Deity as in the higher degree of mentality and vitality exhibited in the elephant. certain facts in the production of species are totally irreconcilable with the operations of that law and can only be made to harmonize with the teleological doctrine of direct acts of intelligent creation, then in every such case we have a conclusive scientific proof of a miracle having been wrought. This is the course of reasoning we have been obliged to adopt throughout our entire argument against evolution in the "Problem of Human Life,”—that if a single miracle were ever wrought, on the part of the Creator, as demonstrated by science, then a miracle becomes a scientific fact and must be received as scientific evidence in every case where ordinary or natural processes fail to explain the phenomena. In the course of that discussion we found scores of phenomena in the origin of species, many of which were conceded by Darwin to be entirely inexplicable on the principles of natural selection, the only possible explanation of which being that of direct miraculous inter Although the great Hoe printing-press shows more ingenuity than the invention of a simple folding-chair, yet the inventor of the folding-vention. chair could as easily have made the printingpress by a still higher cultivation of his intel-cases where by the assent of Darwin himself a lect. Infinite capacity or genius can not be cultivated; therefore the creation of any form of organic life would be alike easy to the mind of a creator capable of producing Darwin's primordial ascidian. We have no space here to give a list of these miraculous interposition is the only solution of the problem. For a full discussion of that phase of Darwinism, so important to the religious philosopher, we refer all parties interested to the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Chapters of the "Problem of Human Life.' Is it not therefore a bald specimen of logical inconsistency to admit the construction of the first animal species by direct creative acts on But not to leave this part of our subject enthe part of an intelligent and personal Deity, tirely without an illustration in this paper, we and then seek to finish the work by the opera- here add a couple of extracts from the last tion of the unintelligent forces of nature chapter of the work named, which will show through the so-called law of natural selection? the trend of that entire controversy with evoDarwin's carefully repeated limit of the crea-lution and natural selection: tor to a "few simple forms" is disingenuous, as he himself teaches that the simplest conceivable organism is incomprehensibly "complex." Here is a specimen of his own real conception of what he calls simple forms" as the mere preparatory ingredients upon which the marvelous and superior law of natural selection was to be set to work. .. (Extracts from the "Problem of Human Life.") The object in this closing chapter will be to point out some of the more prominent and manifest difficulties in the way of evolution as a reasonable or scientific hypo thesis, and to indicate such contradictions and inconsistencies as can not possibly be found in a theory based on truth. whether claiming to be scientific or not. The evident impossibility of the origin of wings, for example, in flying animals, such as birds, bats, insects, and some reptiles and fishes, by natural selection, is alone sufficient to overthrow evolution if there was not another objection to the hypothesis. It is a difficulty which has not only never been answered, but has remained a distinct rebuttal of the evolution hypothesis ever since the first publication of Mr. Darwin's Origin of Species. In his later editions of that work, he has had the candor to refer to this objection and state it, but has lacked the candor to admit its unanswerable character,-while, at the same time, he does not even make an attempt to meet it. No better proof need be asked to show that the origin of wings must have been the result of special miraculous creation than this failure on the part of all evolutionists, from Mr. Darwin "In every living creature we may feel assured that a host of lost characters lie ready to be evolved under proper conditions." * * * "We can not fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked upon as a microcosm-a little universe-formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven." "Animals and Plants," vol. 11, pp. 478 483. How frivolous then for Darwin to reiterate the "few simple forms" when according to his own showing, there is no such being as a simple form, but that "every living creature' is of "marvelous complexity," a "microcosm, a "little universe" with parts "as numerous as the stars of heaven!" What more could be said of an elephant or of a human being? Plainly, Darwin's originally created "as-down, to point out even a supposable solution on the cidian proves too much and shows that this wonder-working law of natural selection was entirely unnecessary for the development of the very highest orders, since the admitted creative acts which produced the simplest conceivable organisms with their inconceivable powers, did all for them in the way of "complexity" and "heterogeneity" that natural selection and survival of the fittest have ever done, only we haven't the eyes to see it. It follows from the foregoing that all the way through the claimed achievements of the law of natural selection, if it shall transpire that basis of natural selection. If any imaginable explanation had been possible it would surely some time or other have been attempted. How such great naturalists as Darwin, Huxley, and Haeckel, can feel satisfied still to believe in evolution while quietly ignoring this crushing difficulty, seen in its millions of forms all around them,-while each bird, bat, or insect, constitutes a perpetual refutation of their theory of natural selection,-is more than I can comprehend. The reason why they can not even attempt an explanation of this problem will now clearly be shown. Natural selection, Mr. Darwin repeatedly and particularly reminds his readers, can not, in the first place, produce an organ of any kind, since it can not even "This preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious [such as partly developed wings, which could be of no service,] I have called natural selection or sur 66 "Several writers have misapprehended or objected to the term natural selection. Some have even imagined that natural selection induces variability, whereas it implies only the preservation of such variations as arise and are beneficial to the being under its conditions of life."."-"Unless favorable variations be inherited by some at least of the offspring, nothing can be effected by natural selection."-DARWIN, Origin of Species, pp. 63, 80. Mr. Darwin and other evolutionists can easily tell how natural selection might cultivate a bird's wings by making them more and more effective after such wings exist, and are so far useful as to answer the functional purpose of flying. But until the wings of birds are so far developed as actually to serve the purpose of flight they are utterly useless (with a very few exceptions, as in the case of the ostrich,) and Mr. Darwin is well aware of it. Hence, natural selection could not have touched the first bird's wings during all their incipient stages of development, since such stumps or rudiments of wings could have been of no service to the bird. The common intelligence of every reader must assure him that a stump of a wing in any animal would not only be useless but would be a clumsy and awkward appendage, burthensome for transportation and requiring extra nutrition for its growth and waste of substance. Hence, during all the incipiency of the wing-bones in starting the organ, or until the wings became at least of sufficient size to aid in running, as with the wings of the ostrich referred to, they would be not only useless but harmful, for the reasons given. No answer can possibly be made to this state of facts; and therefore no answer has ever been attempted. There is a distinct intelligent design in the wing of a bird, bat, or insect, and it defies the ingenuity and reason of any man to conceive of such adaptation of the most wonderful mechanical principles and parts to uses and results, without admitting an .ntelligent purpose in the very incipiency of the mechanism. Atheism, materialism, pantheism, evolution, and every other theory or philosophical hypothesis which denies the absolute and intelligent existence and intervention of a personal Creator must forever stand dumb and confounded in the presence of a humming-bird. The whole question of evolution, with its truth or falsity, is thus narrowed right down to this one class of facts-the wings of birds. If they could not, by any possibility, have originally been produced by natural selection, as I will now demonstrate, then the intervention of an intelligent Creative Will is an unavoidable necessity. No candid evolutionist can or will dispute this. The idea of the possible development of a wing by natural selection saving up slight favorable variations is a very different thing from the development of a leg in a snake, for instance, or any animal which is legless, and which moves on the ground. Evolutionists might, with some show of plausibility, claim that the nascent leg of a reptile, even in its most incipient rudiment or before it showed through the skin, might be of some use in causing a sensible protuberance of the surface at that portion of the body which might act upon the ground in helping to move the body of the snake. But not so with the wing of a bird. All its earlier stages of development would not only have been useless but actually harmful, as shown, consuming nutrition and strength for transportation; and therefore natural se lection, so far from assisting its development, wouldaided by the economy of growth-have suppressed it, since Mr. Darwin in a score of places reiterates the law that natural selection "acts only," "acts exclusively," "acts solely," in saving variations which are "beneficial," while he repeatedly tells us that The movement of any body through the air which is many times its specific gravity is utterly unnatural, and opposed to every law or principle of evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin above. Such a mode of locomotion as the movement of a body through the atmosphere having a thousand times its weight, being absolutely opposed to Nature, is, therefore, in its original design and construction, supernatural! Being supernatural, and depending for its accomplishment on the combination of numerous mechanical devices and principles, in opposition to the laws of Nature, and embracing the highest elements and faculties of reason, it amounts to an absolute demonstration that the first wings were constructed and adapted to their use by an intelligent Creative Will! Evolutionists often ask their opponents to produce a miracle. I assert that birds, bats, and insects, are perpetual and unmistakable miracles, at least in their primal origin, according to the intrinsic definition of the word. Our dictionaries define a miracle to be a supernatural event-an occurrence contrary to the established laws of Nature. The flying of a bird, a thousand times heavier than the air, is a purely mechanical process,— an operation of the very highest order of intelligent skill,-and is accomplished in violation of the central law of Nature-gravitation. There is no part of the process of flying but what is or must have been in its primordial commencement a miraculous operation, since all its mechanical results come from the intelligent use of one law of Nature by which to overcome another, and are therefore supernatural events. Thus, evolutionists have the indisputable proof of bona fide miracles all around them all the time; while the inventor who shall in the future construct an apparatus by which a man may fly through the air by the mechanical aid of wings alone, operated by his own individual strength, will have wrought a new miracle in mechanics, and one of the greatest since the world began. Such a supernatural event I believe not only possible but probable, and in strict accord with the rapidly advancing triumphs of human skill in employing one set of Nature's laws to overcome and render subservient another set. While the assumption here maintained (that the incipient structure or unuseful stage of a bird's wing, if developed at all, could not have been produced by natural selection), would seem an almost self-evident proposition, I will add a few remarks and quotations which will prevent the most casual reader from losing the annihilating force of this single argument. I have already shown from Mr. Darwin, as just quoted, that natural selection can not induce a single variation, much less a whole organ,-that it can "only" save by survival of the fittest those slight variations which happen to "arise" and are "beneficial" to the creature. As shown in the preceding chapter, Mr. Darwin lays it down as a law of evolution. that natural selection can not advance by sudden leaps, but must proceed by means of short and slow steps. I will add here a citation or two: "Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap [such as producing an efficient wing], but must advance by short and sure though slow steps.' "Natural selection is a slow process, and the same favorable conditions must long endure in order that any marked effect should thus be produced." "As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great sudden modifications [such as a useful wing]; it can act only by short and slow steps." Natural selection acts exclusively by the preservation and accumulation of variations which are beneficial."-DARWIN, Origin of Spécies, pp. 97, 156, 180, 413. The reader can not misunderstand this language. A wing of a bird has a score or more of distinct, ingenious, |