CHAPTER II.

WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY?

In the previous chapter we saw the evidences of God's skill and wisdom

in the adaptations of nature, fitting the organs of animals for hearing,

walking, and eating, and especially in the structure of the human eye.

This has long been owned by candid minds as an unanswerable argument,

demonstrating the being of God by the works of his hands. But since that

chapter was written a school of scientists has arisen, of whom Mr.

Darwin is at present the most popular, claiming to be able to show how

all the species of living things can evolve, not only their eyes, but

their legs and wings and lungs, and every part of them, from a little

bit of primeval life stuff, called protoplasm, by the influence of

Natural Selection. Mr. Darwin owns that the formation of an eye is

rather a tough job for a little pin point germ of protoplasm; but he has

no doubt that it has been done, and he writes several books to show us

how. We propose to look into this self-evolving process, as he and his

brother evolutionists describe their theory.

It is necessary, right here at the outset, to distinguish the theory of

the evolutionists from the great fact of evolution. Almighty God created

the world, not only for his own pleasure, but also for his own glory,

that men and angels might learn to know him by his works. Creation is

thus God's great object lesson for men and angels to learn. But learning

is a process, gradual, slow, from one step to another. Therefore the

object lesson must not be precipitated all in a heap upon the infantile

intellects of the learners, but unfolded by degrees. Geologists assure

us that so it was in the past; that first the lifeless strata were

deposited; next, light was evolved; afterward, fishes, and marine

reptiles, and birds; then came the carboniferous or plant era; afterward

the mammalia; last of all man. You observe here an ascending scale of

creation, beginning with first principles and simple forms, and

ascending to the most complicated; a series of experiments in God's

great lecture-room, illustrative of the various steps of the evolution

of the divine idea. But six thousand years before geology was born Moses

described this same evolution of creation, in the first chapter of

Genesis. As he could not have learned it from any science known in his

day, God Himself must have shown it to him.

The divine idea is still in process of evolution for our instruction. We

behold it in the continual formation of new strata by the destruction of

the old; in the chemical combinations of the elements of the air, sea,

and earth; in the evolution of the grass from the seed, and of the oak

from the acorn; in the development of the insect germ into the

caterpillar, and the butterfly; in the hatching of the egg into the

chicken; and in the growth of the infant into the man. We observe also a

divine development of society, an advance of civilization, a

providential guidance of history, and a fall and disorder among mankind,

with a process of redemption, medical, educational, political and

religious, for the human race. The whole process, therefore, of the

creation, natural history, and moral government of the world, is the

development of a divine idea, according to a divine plan, by the direct

or mediate efficacy of divine power, for the accomplishment of the

divine purpose as revealed to us in the divine word, the Holy

Scriptures. Galen taught that the study of physiology was a divine hymn.

This divine development is to be clearly and sharply distinguished from

the atheistic theory of evolution. They differ in the following

particulars:

1. The divine development of the world is a great fact; the theory of

atheistic evolution is only a baseless theory, a fiction.

2. The divine development begins in the beginning, with God, creating

the heavens and the earth; but the theory of atheistic evolution has no

beginning, asserting the eternal existence of a changing world.

3. The divine development is the unfolding of an intelligent plan,

showing the adaptation of means to ends for the accomplishment of a

purpose; the atheistic theory of evolution denies plan, purpose,

adaptation and final cause.

4. The divine development is conducted, and continually reinforced by

the will of the Omnipotent God; the atheistic development evolves only

the forces of matter.

5. The divine development has a moral character, and terminates in the

highest holiness and happiness of all obedient men and angels; but the

atheistic development contemplates and promises only the evolution of

animal instinct and passions, the eternal death of the individual, and,

for the universe, only purposeless cycles of progress, and catastrophies

of ruin.

In this chapter we discuss only the theory of atheistic evolution. In

the discussion of all questions affecting human life it is advantageous

to trace them to their origin, and to follow them out to their practical

results. Thus we get a clear view of the whole subject, and are enabled

to assign to it its proper influence. It is also a great benefit to the

mass of mankind to conduct such discussions in plain language, and to

translate the roundabout phrases, and the Latinized words of scientific

men, as much as we can, into the vulgar tongue; to state the subjects of

discussion so as to be understood of the people. So we shall put the

whole business of Darwinism and development before you, reader, in a

nutshell, by simply asking you the question at the head of this chapter,

"Was your mother a monkey?"

What a question!

Well, then, your grandmother? her grandmother? or does it seem less

offensive, or more likely to you to go back some thousands of years, and

say your forefathers were apes?

That is exactly what Mr. Darwin says when we translate his scientific

language into the vulgar tongue: "The early progenitors of man were no

doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were

pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a

tail having the proper muscles. The foot, judging from the condition of

the great toe in the foetus, was then prehensile, and our progenitors,

no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm

forest-clad land. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which

served them as formidable weapons."[5] This ancient form "if seen by a

naturalist, would undoubtedly have been ranked as an ape or a monkey.

And as man, under a genealogical point of view, belongs to the CATARHINE

or Old World stock (of monkeys), we must conclude, however much the

conclusion may revolt our pride, that our early progenitors would have

been properly thus designated."[6] So here you have your genealogy, name

and thing fully described. Mr. Darwin thinks it is quite an honorable

pedigree: "Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length,

but not, it may be said, of noble quality. * * * Unless we willfully

close our eyes, we may, with our present knowledge, approximately

recognize our parentage, nor need we feel ashamed of it. The most humble

organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our

feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature,

however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvelous

structure and properties."[A] There are people, however, who do not grow

enthusiastic at the idea of their long-tailed progenitors; but there is

no accounting for taste in such matters!

For elderly people, who do not take so enthusiastically to monkeys as

his junior readers, Mr. Darwin has provided a rather less gymnastic

ancestry. How would you like to have a fish for your forefather? If it

were one of Neptune's noble tritons, or the Philistine fish-god, Dagon,

or a mermaid, it might not be so repulsive as the ape; or even a

twenty-pound salmon, flashing its silver and blue in the sunlight as it

spins the line off the reel, might not be so utterly disgusting as the

monkey burlesque of humanity. But, alas! Mr. Darwin has been sent to

this proud nineteenth century as the prophet to teach us humility, and

here is the scientific statement of the structure of our fishy

forefathers: "At a still earlier period the progenitors of man must have

been aquatic in their habits, for morphology plainly tells us that our

lungs consist of a modified swim bladder which once served as a float.

These early predecessors of man thus seen in the dim recesses of time

must have been as lowly organized as the lancelot or amphibioxus, or

even still more lowly organized."[7]

That certainly is a very humble origin. We are not, however, by any

means to the end of our pedigree. Mr. Darwin says that your codfish

aristocracy are descended from a race of squirts--the squirts which you

picked up on the shore and squeezed, when you were a boy, discharging

these primitive Babcock Extinguishers upon your playfellows,

irreverently regardless of the harm done the poor squirt, the ancestor

of the human race. If you doubt it, here is the latest deliverance of

infallible science upon the subject. He describes the Ascidians: "They

hardly appear like animals, and consist of a simple tough leathery sack,

with two small projecting orifices. They belong to the Molluscoida of

Huxley, a lower division of the great family of the Mollusca; but they

have recently been placed by some naturalists among the vermes or worms.

Their larvæ somewhat resemble tadpoles in shape, and have the power of

swimming freely about. * * * We should thus be justified in believing

that, at an extremely remote period, a group of animals existed

resembling in many respects the larvæ of our present Ascidians, which

diverged into two great branches, the one retrograding in development

and producing the present class of Ascidians, the other rising to the

crown and summit of the animal kingdom, by giving birth to the

vertebrata."[8] Thus it appears that Mr. Darwin deduces his origin, and

that of mankind in general, from one of these Ascidians, or, in plain

English, makes them a race of squirts.

The notion of evolution is a belief that all living beings, plants as

well as animals, have not been created, but, like Topsy, just grew, from

the very smallest germs or spores. Evolutionists inform us that all

kinds of organisms have been evolved from four or five primeval germs or

spores; or more consistently with their great principle, that the simple

gave birth to the differentiated, from one primeval germ or egg. Mr.

Darwin alleges four or five primal forms, acknowledging that analogy

would lead him up to one. But other members of this school consistently

and boldly follow up the stream to its fountain, and allege a single

primeval living seed as the origin of all living things, and that this

must have been a microscopic animalcule, or plant spore, of the very

lowest order, which, multiplying its kind, gave birth to improved and

enlarged offspring; and they, in their turn, grew, and multiplied, and

differentiated into varieties; and so, in the course of endless ages,

the poorer sorts perishing and the better sorts prospering, the world

became filled with its existing populations, without any new creative

acts of God, and without any particular providential care over the new

species.

The particular process according to which this multiplication and

improvement took place, Mr. Darwin calls Natural Selection. Every

creature tends to increase and multiply; and the very slowest breeders

would soon fill the earth, were their multiplication not checked by

hunger, by the attacks of enemies, and by the struggle for existence.

But all are not born alike strong, or swift, or of the same color; some

of the same brood are better fitted to escape enemies, or to fight the

battle of life, than others. These will survive, while the weak ones

perish. This Mr. Wallace calls, the survival of the fittest. They will

transmit their superior size, or swiftness, or better color, or whatever

superiority they possess, to their offspring. The process will go on in

successive generations, each adding an infinitesimal quantity to the

stock gained by the past generation; just as breeders of improved stock

increase the weight of cattle by breeding from the largest; or breeders

of race-horses increase the speed by breeding from the swiftest. In this

way varieties from the same family will grow into different species.

And, as only those differences which are beneficial to the animal are

preserved, they will grow into improved species; and, as variations of

all sorts take place, so all sorts of varieties and species arise in

process of time. All will thus tend to perfect themselves according to

the laws of nature, and without any special oversight or care of God, or

of anybody but Natural Selection; which Mr. Darwin takes special care to

describe as an unintelligent selector. He defines the nature which

selects to be "the aggregate action and product of natural laws," and

these laws are "the sequences of events as ascertained by us." He

ridicules the idea of God's special endowment of the fantail pigeon with

additional feathers, or of the bull dog's jaws with strength, and says,

"But if we give up the principle in the one case, if we do not admit

that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in

order, for instance, that the greyhound, that perfect image of symmetry

and vigor, might be formed; no shadow of reason can be assigned for the

belief that variations alike in nature, and the results of the same

general laws which have been the groundwork through Natural Selection of

the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were

intentionally and specially guided."[9] This, then, is the grand

distinctive difference of Mr. Darwin's mode of producing the various

animals; namely, that it is unintelligent, their variations are not

designed nor intended by the Creator, but they are the results of a

method of trial and error, producing a hit-and-miss pattern. The

failures all perish, and the successes live and prosper; but there is no

intentional or special guidance of God in the business. And the business

includes the whole process of peopling the globe, from the creation of

the first four or five germs down to the last formation of human

society. God is thus dismissed from the greatest part of the world's

life, including all human affairs. This is not exactly atheism in

theory, but practically it amounts to much the same thing.

It is this excommunication of God's agency from the management of the

world, and especially from human affairs, by Mr. Darwin's method, which

has so commended his books to the ungodly world. There is a general

agreement among this class of writers, that Mr. Darwin has destroyed the

basis of the argument for the being of God from design as displayed in

the adaptations of birds and beasts to their conditions. Mr. Huxley says

that "when he first read Mr. Darwin's book, what struck him most

forcibly was the conviction that teleology, as commonly understood, had

received its death blow at Mr. Darwin's hands."[10] "For the notion that

every organism has been created as it is, and launched straight at a

purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may

fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary

incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding

conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become

extinguished. * * * For the teleologist (the Christian) an organism

exists, because it was made for the conditions in which it was found.

For the Darwinian an organism exists, because out of many of its kind it

is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in

which it was found. * * * If we apprehend the spirit of the Origin of

Species rightly, then nothing can be more entirely and absolutely

opposed to teleology, as it is commonly understood, than the Darwinian

theory."[11] Prof. Haeckel argues to the same purpose that Darwin's

theory leads inevitably to Atheism and Materialism. Dr. Buchner says of

Darwin's theory, "It is the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be

imagined, and far more atheistic than that of his decried predecessor,

Lamarck." Carl Vogt also commends it because "It turns the Creator, and

his occasional intervention in the revolution of the earth and in the

production of species, without any hesitation out of doors, inasmuch as

it does not leave the smallest room for the agency of such a Being. The

first living germ being granted, out of it the creation develops itself

progressively by Natural Selection, through all the geologic periods of

our planet, by the simple law of descent. No new species arise by

creation, and none perishes by annihilation; the natural cause of

things, the process of evolution of all organisms, and of the earth

itself, is of itself sufficient for the production of all we see. Thus

man is not a special creation, produced in a different way, and distinct

from other animals, endowed with an individual soul, and animated by the

breath of God; on the contrary, man is only the highest product of the

progressive evolution of animal life, springing from the group of apes

next below him."[12]

Whether, therefore, Mr. Darwin himself intends his theory to be

atheistic or not, it has had the misfortune to be so viewed by the

greater number of its supporters; and, accordingly, it is this view of

it which we shall keep prominent in the following discussion. Mr. Darwin

does undoubtedly intend his theory to be antagonistic to the Bible

account of creation and providence, and an improvement upon it; and,

whether atheistic or not, it is undoubtedly anti-Christian.

_I. The History of the Theory._

The first thing which strikes a common person on first hearing this

theory is that it is a very queer notion for any Christian man to

invent. We are naturally curious to know how a man, educated in a

Christian country, could have fallen into it. But it is, in fact, no new

discovery, but an old heathen superstition. Some four hundred years

before Christ, when the world had almost wholly apostatized into

idolatry, Democritus, among the Greeks, became offended with the vulgar

heathen gods, and set himself to invent a plan of the world without

them. From Eastern travelers the Greeks knew that the Brahmins, in

India, had a theory of the world developing itself from a primeval egg.

He set himself to refine upon it, and imagined virtually the Nebular

Hypothesis. He said that all matter consisted of very small atoms,

dancing about in all directions, from all eternity, and which at last

happened into the various forms of the present world.

The ancient Phoenicians held a theory that all life was from the sea;

and that, as the wet mud produces all sorts of herbs in spring now, so

originally it produced all manner of animals. They worshiped it as a

god, and called it Mot, or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and

carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men

sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like

sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still

further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of

Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr.

Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, when

some of them, it seems, favored it. But it seems to be an unlucky dogma,

since, with the downfall of the power of the false prophet, the

anti-Christian form of science went down again.

The dogma of the transmutation of species reappeared, however, in the

Romish Church in a religious form; the old heathenism, which had never

been wholly banished from the minds of men, thus reasserting itself.

About the tenth century some began to teach that the bread of the

communion of the Lord's Supper was transubstantiated, and the wine also,

into the body, and blood, and soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus

Christ. This is probably the most complete transmutation of species

which has ever been imagined or described. The evolution of bread into

Deity is only equaled by Mr. Tyndall's endowment of matter with all the

potencies of life and thought; a miracle differing from the popish

transubstantiation only in the element of time, but in its essential

nature equally supernatural. The dogma excited great discussion for

centuries, and produced as many theories of transubstantiation as we now

observe of evolution, keeping philosophic minds and pens busy till the

dawn of modern science after the Reformation.

La Place threw out the Nebular Hypothesis, which is substantially

Democritus' concourse of atoms, only La Place endeavored to substitute

circular motions under the law of gravitation, instead of Democritus'

chance arrangement, as a sufficient cause for the formation and motions

of planets. Herschel's discovery of the nebulæ was hastily laid hold of

by a number of writers, and notably by the author of the Vestiges of

Creation, as furnishing the primeval matter necessary for world-making;

and till the spectroscopic discoveries of the composite nature of

gaseous nebulæ, they were claimed as specimens of worlds in process of

formation. La Place supposed his nebulous matter to be gas in a state of

white-heat combustion, compared with which the heat of the hottest fire

would be a cool bath. In no other way could he dissipate the world's

substance into sufficient thinness for his vortices. But Spencer saw

that this tremendous heat would be fatal to all forms of life, and

especially to sensitive beings; and Tyndall shows us that this original

matter must have had all the potencies of life and sensation, and a

potency of sensation means being able to feel. Now the worst fate

threatened against sinners in the Bible is a place in the lake burning

with fire and brimstone, which burns at 500° Fahrenheit; but the

temperature of the original fire-mist was a thousand times hotter. Some

of these scientists call such a fate as the Bible threatens against the

wicked, cruel. But here is a hell manufactured by the evolutionists

infinitely worse than that of the Bible; for the hell of the Bible is

only for the wicked, but the evolutionists' hell is indiscriminately for

all, saints and sinners, and all sorts of creatures, innocent as babes

unborn of any crime; yet they, or, which is the same thing, the matter

containing all the potency of their sensations, that is their power of

feeling, were born in this hell, and kept in it from all eternity, until

it pleased the evolutionists to begin to cool it down a little. However,

it was rather scientific than benevolent reasons which induced Mr.

Spencer to reverse the order of procedure, and make his star dust cold

to begin with, and to heat it up by condensation and pressure to about

the temperature of molten iron; which was still an uncomfortably warm

lodging for Mr. Tyndall's potencies of sensation for some millions of

years. The division of opinion about the original nebulæ, however, still

prevails; some evolutionists of the old-fashioned order still taking

their nebulæ hot, while others, with Spencer, prefer it cold, with star

dust.

As to the Spontaneous Generation of life, there has been less progress

of opinion, though great variety has been exhibited. Ovid and Virgil

describe the way in which a carcass produces bees. It was generally

believed that putrid meat produced the maggots, till the blow-flies were

discovered laying their eggs. Then it was alleged that the entozoa, the

worms found in the bodies of animals, were self-produced, without eggs,

until the microscope discovered that one could lay 60,000 eggs. Strauss,

however, adhered to the idea that as the tapeworm, as he supposed, was

self-produced, so man was originated by the primeval slime. So also

Professor Vogt, and M. Tremaux develop their animals from the land, and

the latter accounts for their various qualities from the various

qualities of their respective birthplaces, the crop being conditioned by

the soil. But Mr. Darwin derives all his organisms from the sea.

Electricity in its galvanic form was for a while the agent to fire the

earthly or marine mud with the vital spark; and Mr. Crosse's experiments

were supposed instances of the creation of acarii or mites in the

battery bath, until it was found that the bath contained eggs and the

electricity only hatched them. Some English evolutionists still adhere

to the theory of Spontaneous Generation, but the leading Germans deny

any instance of it being known. Huxley denies that any case of it has

been established as now practicable; but supposes that if we could have

been present at the beginning of the world, when all the elements were

young and vigorous, we should have seen the chemical elements of the

earth and air combining to form living beings, by the mere powers of

their nature. If that were the fact, it would be a fact unique and

unparalleled, utterly out of the course of nature, and so as contrary to

the theory of evolution as if these living beings had been inspired with

life by Almighty God.

So the theory here again is divided. Two utterly irreconcilable ideas of

the origin of life claim our belief--the theories of Biogenesis, and of

Abiogenesis, the one says all life is from the egg, and has always been

so; and so we have an eternal begetting of finite creatures; the other

alleges the spontaneous beginning of plants and animals; a fact, if it

be a fact, as unparalleled as creation, and far more miraculous.

As to the history of the progress of the germs of plants and animals

thus produced, we find still greater diversities of opinion, not only as

to details, but as to principles. Each inventor has added to, or

altered, the original idea of evolution, until it has been burdened with

more improvements and new patents than the sewing machine; only the

evolutionary improvements bid fair to improve the theory out of

existence. We have seen M. Tremaux, with the autochthonic Athenians,

deriving the powers of improvement of plants and animals from their

native soils. Lamarck on the contrary, inspired all his plants and

animals--fungi and frogs, and elephants and apes--with the desire of

getting on in the world and improving their limbs by exercise; so the

greyhound grew slim and fleet by running; the giraffe's neck elongated

by reaching up to the branches of the trees on which it browsed, and the

duck acquired web feet by swimming. Others attributed the evolution of

differences to external conditions. The negro became black by exposure

to the tropical sun; the arctic hare received its coat of thick white

fur from the cold climate, and the buffalo and camel their humps of fat

from the sterility of their pastures at certain seasons, and the

consequent need of a reserved store of fat for food for the rest of the

body. Mr. Darwin's doctrine of Natural Selection refuses Lamarck's

notion of any conscious attempt of the plant or animal at improvement;

and equally denies the power of external nature to improve anything,

except by killing off poor specimens, save in that very limited range

where good pastures make fat animals for a season or two. An innate

power of accidental variation to a very small amount, and the slow but

constant adding up of profitable variations during countless

generations, with the killing off of the unimproved breeds by Natural

Selection, is his patent populator and improver. But this theory is too

slow for the nineteenth century, and so neither Huxley, nor Parsons, nor

Mivart, nor even Wallace, accepts the doctrine as Darwin propounds it.

It is, in fact, already becoming unpopular among scientific men. Lyell

proposed the origination of new species by leaps; as we see great

geniuses born of commonplace parents; and Huxley supports that opinion,

and Parsons, Owen and Mivart coincide in this inexplicable explanation.

The author of the Vestiges of Creation accounts for improved species

from a prolongation of the period of gestation. But Hyatt and Cope

derive them from quite the contrary process--accelerated development of

gestation. MM. Ferris and Kolliker derive them from parthenogenesis, a

mode of genesis of which our world offers no example whatever.

The origin of man, with all his mental powers and religious aspirations,

is the great difficulty. Mr. Mivart excludes man wholly from the

influence of Natural Selection, from the time he acquired a soul. Mr.

Wallace, rejecting the action of one Supreme Intelligence for everything

but the origin of universal forces and laws, "Contemplates the

possibility that the development of the essentially human portions of

man's structure and intellect may have been determined by the directing

influence of some higher intelligent beings acting through natural and

universal laws;"[13] _i. e._, the gods of the old heathen nations. And

so after twenty-two centuries wandering over the world, we have got back

to where Democritus started from--to pure old heathenism.

After such a history of the theory of evolution, and in presence of such

contradictory presentations by its advocates, I need scarcely say that

it is by no means an established scientific principle, were it not for

the insolent manner in which some of them assert it as scientifically

demonstrated; and denounce the Bible doctrine of creation as mere

superstition, "A feather bed of respectable and respected tradition,"

and warn off Christians from any attempt to investigate theories of

cosmogony; and overbear the ignorant by the array of the names of men of

science who give their sanction to some phase of the theory. But let it

be borne in mind that no well-established scientific principle, no

demonstrated law, exhibits such contradictory and conflicting phases as

those we have just witnessed. The laws of gravitation, or of chemical

affinity, for instance, offer no such contradictions of their adherents;

because they are founded on facts, while evolution is a mere notion,

founded on ignorance and error, as we shall presently see. Accordingly,

by far the greater number of the greatest scientists oppose it, as

utterly unscientific, and have recorded their opposition, and the

reasons for it. Sir John Herschel and Sir Wm. Thompson, among

astronomers, have proclaimed its antagonism to the facts of physical

astronomy. No new facts subversive of the foundations of faith in God as

recognized in the universe by Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Leibnitz,

Pascal, Paley and Bell, have been discovered by such scientists as

Whewell, Sedgwick, Brewster, Faraday, Hugh Miller, or our American

geologists, Dawson, Hitchcock, and Dana. Nor have the deliberate and

expanded demonstrations of its unscientific character by the late

lamented Agassiz been ever fairly met, much less overturned. I refer to

these honored names for the benefit of that large class who must take

their science upon faith in some scientific prophet or apostle, in

default of any possibility of personal investigation of the facts.

Indeed, to the great majority, even of so-called scientific men, their

science must be founded upon faith in the dogma of some scientific pope

and council. And to such it may be reassuring, amidst the evolutionists'

cries of Science! Science! to know that a great many of the greatest

scientists, in spite of all these confused assertions, do still believe

in Almighty God, do call their souls their own, and hope when they die

to go to heaven.

As a specimen of the contempt in which this theory is held by the

princes of science, read the following extract of an address by Agassiz,

at a recent meeting of the Academy of Science:[14]

"As I grow older in the ranks of science," said the professor, "I feel

more and more the danger of stretching inferences from a few

observations to a wide field. I see that the younger generation among

naturalists are at this moment falling into the mistake of making

assertions and presenting views as scientific principles which are not

even based upon real observation. I think it is time that some positive

remonstrance be made against that tendency. The manner in which the

evolution theory in zoology is treated would lead those who are not

special zoologists to suppose that observations have been made by which

it can be inferred that there is in nature such a thing as change among

organized beings actually taking place. _There is no such thing on

record._ It is shifting the ground from one field of observation to

another to make this statement, and when the assertions go so far as to

exclude from the domain of science those who will not be dragged into

this mire of mere assertion, then it is time to protest.

"He thought it was intolerant to say he was not on scientific grounds

because he was not falling into the path which was occupied by those who

maintain that all organized beings have been derived from a few original

progenitors. Other supporters of the transmutation doctrine assume that

they can demonstrate the changes to have taken place by showing certain

degrees of resemblance; but what they never touch is the quality and

condition of those few first progenitors from which they were evolved.

They assume that they contained all that is necessary to evolve what

exists now. That is begging the question at the outset; for if these

first prototypes contained the principle of evolution, we should know

something about them from observation, and it should be shown that there

are such organized beings as are capable of evolution.

"I ask, Whence came these properties? If this power and capacity of

change is not inherent to the first progenitors, then I ask, Whence

came the impulses by which those progenitors which have not this power

of change in themselves acquire them? What is the power by which they

are started in directions which are not determined by their primitive

nature? From the total silence of the supporters of the transmutation

theory on these and other points, _he did not think it worth their while

to take the slightest notice of this doctrine of evolution in his

scientific considerations_. He acknowledged what the evolutionists had

done incidentally in scientific research; none had done more than Mr.

Darwin. He believed he had been injured woefully by his adherents. He

was a far better man than most of his school made him."

It is to be acknowledged, however, that many scientists are

evolutionists. Mr. Darwin is not alone in his belief. If he were, it

would not be worth while to spend time in examining it. Quite a number

of scientific men have fallen into it, and lecture and write

commendations of it; and it has become quite popular among a certain

class who do not like to accept the Bible doctrine that God created man,

with its necessary consequence that the creature ought to obey his

Creator; and they have proceeded to patch it out into completeness--for,

as you observe, it is a little defective; like its own primeval squirt,

it lacks a head and a tail--it has neither a beginning nor an end

properly fitted to it. It takes a piece out of the middle of the

universe from the management of God, but it leaves the beginning and the

end totally unaccounted for; telling us neither whence came the first

germs, nor whither tends the final fully developed angel. Mr. Darwin,

though he calls one of his works, the Origin of Species, really avoids

the question of origin. He admits the miracle of the creation of the

four or five original germs of life, which, according to the

evolutionists, is as unscientific as if he admitted four or five

hundred. They desire to escape the operation of God altogether.

Moreover, he gives no account of the origin of the law of heredity, by

which each being produces its like; nor yet of the origin of the power

of variation, according to which profitable variations occur. Here,

then, is still a field in which God reigns. But it is specially with Mr.

Darwin's admission of the Creator to bestow the origin of life that

evolutionists are displeased. If they admit God at the beginning of the

world they see plainly that there is no possibility of getting rid of

him afterward. Messrs. Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, Buchner, Haeckel and

Vogt combine their forces accordingly to evolve the world as we find it

without God's intervention.

Mr. Huxley, perceiving that to make either man, or monkey, or nomad, you

must have materials, kindly brings a little pitcher of protoplasm, which

he calls the physical basis of life. It is the meat our Cæsar feeds on,

and indeed, for that matter, all living things. All vegetable and animal

tissues are made up mostly of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen; and

as the materials of which all living beings are built are the same

originally, and are simply these chemical substances with a little iron,

salt and lime, with their properties, he will have it that all life,

including man's life and thought, is merely a development of protoplasm.

This is the clay out of which all the various bricks, and tiles, and tea

cups, and porcelain vases of the great world building are built. We

don't need to begin with monkeys, nor fish, or pollywogs, now to develop

into men, for we go down to the very bottom, since we have the stuff

they all are made of, namely, protoplasm. Still this clay needs a potter

to mold and bake it.

The difficulty about the protoplasm is that it must be _alive_. You can

not get a living pollywog, no more than a living elephant, out of dead

protoplasm. Mr. Huxley shows very well that all protoplasm consists of

the same materials; in fact, that all flesh is grass, as the Scripture

says. The difficulty is how to convert the grass into flesh, unless by

some animal eating it; or to convert the nitrogen, carbon and water into

grass or grain, or any other form of protein or protoplasm, without the

previous action of some plant. In short, how are we to make the chemical

materials live? Here Mr. Tyndall comes in and endows the matter of the

universe with life, and with all the potency of producing bodies and

souls. In his famous Belfast Address he says: "Abandoning all disguise,

the confession that I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong

the vision backward, beyond the boundary of the experimental evidence,

and discern in this matter, which we in our ignorance, and

notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto

covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and

quality of life."

Yet, after all this marvelous endowment of matter with all potency, we

have not got quite back to the beginning. For still the questions arise,

Where did this almighty matter come from? Who endowed it with these

wonderful potencies? And how does it happen to work so well, in such

orderly and regular evolution of star dust, suns, planets, pollywogs,

monkeys, men and maggots, in eternal cycles, ever advancing higher and

doing better and better for the race, though poorly enough, it appears,

for the miserable individuals? Here Buchner, Vogt, Spencer and other

materialists come in and perfect that which was lacking; showing how the

star dust made itself, and how the paving stones made themselves, and

are under no obligations to any Creator but themselves. Matter and force

are all they need, and endless time in which to work, and they will

account for the universe without any Creator at all. Everything and

every person must be just as it is, according to the regular operation

of the laws of Nature.

As Buchner, Vogt and Spencer have given the system a head, Lubbock,

Evans and others have supplied it with a tail, and demonstrated how

society, and morals, and religion have been excogitated by the apes out

of their meditations in the forests. It is a fearful and wonderful

account they give us of the origin of marriage from the battles of the

baboons, of the rights of property established by terrible fights for

groves of good chestnuts, of the beginnings of morals from the instincts

of brutes, and of the dawnings of religion, or rather of superstition,

from the dreams of these animals; the result of the whole being that

civilization, and society, and law, and order, and religion, are all

simply the evolution of the instincts of the brutes, and that there is

no necessity for invoking any supernatural interference to produce them.

The termination of the whole, as far as you and I are concerned, is that

"We shall fade away as the faint cloud melts into the blue ether," into

the eternal sleep of death.

It thus appears that there is an orderly succession and attempted

adjustment of one part of the doctrine of evolution to another, and that

all the various workers are cooperating toward one grand result. It is

true they differ widely in their professed religious creeds and

political partialities. Mr. Darwin avows his belief in a Creator. Mr.

Huxley votes on the London School Board for the introduction of the

Bible into the public schools. Mr. Spencer is willing to allow the

existence of some great unknowable mystery. Some of the French and

German evolutionists dispense with any reference to God, as an

unnecessary hypothesis. Others oppose the idea of God altogether, as

inimical to progress. M. Comte proposed a worship of humanity. M.

Strauss would worship the universe. But with all this variety of

uniform, and armor, and tactics, the evolutionists are all soldiers of

the same army, and are all fighting the same great battle, for the

brutal origin of man, and his independence of God. From which

independence of God, and brutal origin of mankind, result very

important consequences. For the belief of this notion necessarily

destroys all faith in the Bible, and in the Christianity which it

reveals, and revolutionizes the basis of the civilization founded upon

it, and all the laws protecting life, property, marriage and religion;

which laws are based upon the belief of mankind in the dignity of man,

the sacredness of human life, and the sanction of morality by the

All-seeing Judge of all the earth, who will reward every man according

to his works. For all practical purposes it makes no great difference

whether a man denies that there is any God at all, or admits that there

is some kind of a god who created the world millions of years ago, and

just set it a spinning to work out its destiny as best it might, but

never after concerned himself about it, or its people, and never will;

for nobody will ever trouble his head about a god who never troubles his

head about him.

Most of the evolutionists are zealous advocates of their system. These

propagandists have had such a degree of success in attracting public

attention, in inspiring a large proportion of the secular press, besides

scientific journals, as advocates of their notions, and in obtaining

entrance for them into the common school books, put into the hands of

our children, and into massive quartos published by State legislatures

with the money of Christian people, and in the prevalent corruption of

public morals and breach of private trusts necessarily resulting from

the evolution of these principles, that we are compelled, in

self-defense, to examine the doctrine of evolution. It is all very well

for Mr. Tyndall to warn off everybody, but evolutionists, from any

investigations into cosmogony; about which he owns that they know very

little now, and will not know much for some millions of years to come.

But common people, who will not live so long, but who in the meantime

have to live and make money, and save it, who have children to rear,

and houses which they do not want burned over their heads, who have

taxes to pay, increasing every year, and public plunderers to prosecute

and whose ballots may be asked one of these days for the substitution of

the communes of the original apes, and the Red Republic for these United

States, all upon the alleged scientific proof for the truth of the

doctrine of evolution, and the consequent abolishment of

Christianity--common people, I maintain, by whose money and votes this

dogma is to be established, will not be debarred from asking the why and

the wherefore, neither by Mr. Tyndall, nor by any other scientific pope.

It is a little too late in the day for men who do not know their own

mind from the Alps to Belfast, and who doubt whether God made them

whenever they are dyspeptic, to stand up before the public demanding

that we shut our eyes and open our mouths, and swallow every

preposterous notion they think proper to proclaim as science, to the

destruction of our faith in the God who made us, of our respect for our

brethren of mankind, and of our hope of heaven.

_II. The Illogical Structure of the Theory._

When men come before the world with a dogma freighted with such

wide-reaching revolutions, they ought to be prepared to furnish the most

irrefragable proofs of its truth, and of its obligation and authority.

We should be able to establish it beyond all controversy as based on a

series of facts which take their place historically in the line of the

inductive sciences; about which all men of science are agreed, as all

astronomers, for instance, are agreed about gravitation; and we should

be able to show that each of the alleged consequences flows inevitably

and logically from these established facts. Ignorance, hypothesis,

assumption of facts, sophisms, begging the question, and the like, are

wholly impertinent in any such discussion. Were they even tolerable in

the field of metaphysical discussion, they must, by the rules of the

Positive Philosophy itself, banishing all but ascertained facts from the

halls of science, be excluded from this discussion of an alleged general

law of nature. But when we enter on the examination of the dogma of

evolution, we find its parentage among ignoble superstitions; its

fundamental facts still lie in the darkness of ignorance and assumption;

and its reasoning is illogical and absurd.

The most prominent feature which arrests our notice as we look closely

at the theory of evolution, as presented by any of its prominent

atheistical advocates is, _its illogical and incoherent structure_. The

writer contradicts himself. The various parts of the theory do not hang

together. The alleged facts do not sustain the conclusions deduced from

them. Mr. Darwin's books especially abound in the most intolerable

assumptions of principles and facts, not only without proof, but in the

face of unanswered and unanswerable objections. And the theory is

useless for the purpose of its proposal. All this is utterly at variance

with the method of true science. None but a mind debauched by bigoted

attachment to a preconceived theory could overlook these fatal defects

in the system. Indeed both Darwin and Huxley admit that acceptance of

the evidence must be preceded by belief in the principle of evolution.

It is marvelous that any properly educated student of mental science

should accept a theory so incoherent, in which the rents are scarcely

held together by the patches. We can only exhibit a few specimens of the

multitude of these fatal inconsistencies and deficiencies.

The theory is useless as an explanation of the arcana of Nature. Mr.

Darwin is, by his own acknowledgment, a very ignorant man--ignorant of

the very things necessary for him to know before he can construct a

method of creation, and unable to explain to us what he sets out to

explain. He confesses himself ignorant of the origin and laws of

inheritance, by which his whole system hangs together; of the common

ancestors from which he alleges all creatures are derived; of the laws

of correlation of parts, though these are indispensable to development;

of the reasons of the extinction of species, which is the great

business, the very trade of his great agent, Natural Selection. He has

no knowledge of the duration of past ages, though that duration is an

essential element of his calculations. The spontaneous variations of

plants and animals are the very mainspring of his machine; but he tells

us he knows nothing of the laws governing them; nor has he any

information about the creation of the primordial forms, nor about the

date of beginning, or rate of progress.[15] All which are necessary to

be known in order to the formation of a correct theory. Again and again,

when confronted with facts which his theory can not explain, he takes

refuge in confessions of ignorance. When he meets facts which flatly

contradict his theory of the imperceptible beneficial acquirement of

organs, or of properties by inheritance--such as the sterility of

hybrids, the instincts of neuter bees, the battery of the electric eel,

the human eye, and the eye of the cuttle-fish, he owns that "_it is

impossible to conceive_ by what steps these wondrous organs have been

produced." When asked for the missing links between existing species, he

refers us to the undiscovered fossiliferous strata below the Silurian.

So Sir C. Lyell refers us for a view of the apes, which developed the

first men, to the unexplored geological regions of Central Africa! And

Rev. Baden Powell refers us, for the missing links of the chain of

development, to "that enormous period of which we are, from the

conditions, _precluded from knowing any thing whatever_." And as to the

Origin of Species, the very thing the title of his book proclaims, and

how the original germs varied into the four or five primeval forms, and

these into the next, he says: "_Our ignorance of the laws of variation

is profound!_" And that is science!

The Christian acknowledges his ignorance of the method of creation; but

he presents a sufficient cause for the existence of the facts. The

evolutionist ridicules the Bible account of creation as

incomprehensible, and then he gives us an account which he himself owns

to be incomprehensible, and which we, besides, perceive to be absurd. He

proposes to explain to us the origin of species, and locates it in the

geological strata of an unexplored continent, and in those remote ages

of which by the conditions _we are precluded from knowing any thing

whatever_! Objecting to the idea of the God of the Bible, as a

self-existent, infinite, intelligent, omnipotent, good Spirit, because

of its unthinkability, Messrs. Spencer, Tyndall, and the rest assure us

of the eternal self existence of an intelligent cloud of gas, endowed

with all promises and potencies, of life and thought, as a simple and

intelligible substitute! Belief in God Almighty is only superstition,

but faith in Mr. Tyndall's gas-god is science. Mr. Spencer honestly

lands in the unknowable. Well, then, what science have we gained of the

mysteries of our origin?

Of the self-contradictions of evolutionists, we have an instance in

Huxley's treatment of the fundamental fact of his system--protoplasm.

The grand question is: How does the protoplasm become alive? In his

famous lecture on the subject, Physical Basis of Life, he argues

throughout, that life is a property of protoplasm; that protoplasm owes

its properties to the nature and arrangement of its molecules; that

there is no more need to infer or allege a faculty called vitality, to

account for the production of these various properties of the

protoplasm from its chemical constituents, than to infer a power called

aquosity, to account for the generation of water from oxygen and

hydrogen; and that our thoughts are the expression of molecular changes

in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena.

Briefly, our minds are manufactured by our bodies. But in his more

recent work, the Classification of Animals, 1869, without any retraction

of his previous error, or acknowledgment that he has changed his mind,

he flatly contradicts his Physical Basis, accepting and indorsing "the

well-founded doctrine that life is the cause and not the consequence of

organization."

A still more ridiculous incoherency of the same sort is displayed in the

logical department of Huxley's Physical Basis of Life; where, after

trying to persuade us to put our feet on the ladder which leads in the

reverse direction from Jacob's, and to descend with him into the slough

of materialism, and affirming that "our thoughts are the expression of

molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our

other vital phenomena;" he goes on to say, that he does not believe in

materialism. And he tries to vindicate himself by asserting that "we

know nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is." And

this after deducing our thoughts from the molecular changes of the

protoplasm! A pretty story truly, and an impudent one! Here is a man who

will tell you all about how your body made your soul out of protoplasm,

and in the next page acknowledges that he knows nothing about the

composition of either the body or soul as it is! And yet this man will

mock the believers in the Bible as "smothering their minds under a

respectable feather bed of tradition," because they hesitate to shut

their eyes, and swallow his contradictions.

Mr. Wallace gives us a specimen of this logical incoherence affecting if

possible still more deeply the foundations of philosophic faith.[16] He

heads his paragraph _Matter is Force_, and goes on to argue that matter

is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly

understood, does not exist. Then in a couple of pages he goes on to

argue "that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually

_is_, the will of higher intelligences, or of one Supreme Intelligence."

But the whole tenor of his book is thus demolished; since evolution, if

it means anything, means the interposition of natural law between the

will of the one Supreme Intelligence and the universe. And on this

theory Mr. Wallace's criticisms on Mr. Darwin and others are impious,

being criticisms upon parts of the will of the one Supreme Intelligence.

Similar instances of self-contradiction could be given, did space

permit, from almost every advocate of evolution.

Our space permits the exhibition of but a single instance of the

inherent incoherency of the theory. There is nothing in which all the

atheistic evolutionists are more emphatic than in the exclusion of

design from the universe. All their arguments and sneers are leveled

against the idea, that the adaptations of Nature were designed or

intended by an intelligent mind; and the theory of evolution is welcomed

chiefly because it enables them to give some account of the order of the

world, without any acknowledgment of a providence guiding it to some end

or purpose. But yet all these same evolutionists proclaim progress as

the great law of Nature, and expend themselves with wonderful eloquence

in tracing the progress of nebulæ into worlds, and of worms into men.

They glory in progress of the past, and prophesy progress in the future,

apparently in the most childish unconsciousness, that the very idea of

progress involves design, and that the fact of progress asserts

providence. Nor is there any escape by alleging necessity of Nature,

which is merely endowing the designer of progress with omnipotence as

well as omniscience.

The illogical character of the theory is still further manifested by the

failure of its alleged facts to sustain the consequences deduced from

them. Suppose all the facts alleged by the atheistic evolutionists were

granted, how would they do away with the evidence of the being and

government of God? as they loudly allege they do. Let it be granted that

all men grew up from monkeys, and the monkeys from worms, and all worms

grew from invisible animalculæ, and that the animalculæ flashed into

life by the chemical contact of the materials of the protoplasm, and

that the protoplasm was a natural crop of the cooling globe, and that

the cooling globe condensed itself out of fire mist or nebulæ or star

dust, I demand to know how does all that enable me to get rid of the law

of causation? It is a necessary law of my nature to believe that every

effect demands an adequate cause. It is equally a law of my nature to

believe that every compound, or composite substance, is an effect, that

the compound did not compound itself.

Here is a great effect--a universe in solution, with all the chemical

constituents of our globe and solar system floating in it, and all their

laws of chemical affinity and proportion, and all their electrical

attractions and repulsions, in full operation (else we would never get a

universe to thicken down out of it); and besides, all the potencies of

vegetable and animal life, and all the great powers of the human mind,

in a rather vaporous condition, it is true, but still all

there--Socrates, Seneca and Solomon, Moses, Solon and Blackstone, Homer,

Milton and Shakespeare, Demosthenes, Cicero and Daniel Webster, Watt,

Stephenson, Fulton and Morse, popes, puritans and evolutionists,

universities and newspapers and congresses, the United States and the

British Empire, and the rest of mankind--all boiled up into Mr.

Tyndall's potencies, but all there in potency, just as truly as they

ever were here in fact. Well! here is a great effect just as

imperatively demanding a great First Cause as the world afterward formed

out of it. These substances did not make themselves then, any more than

the resulting persons or paving stones make themselves now, and they did

not endow themselves with these potencies, nor calculate and establish

these laws of chemical combination in exact proportion, nor determine

scientifically the laws of gravitation and electricity and light and

heat, before they came into being; which must have all been established

before a single particle of the star dust could begin to cool, or to

approach another. The very first idea of matter or of force we can form

demands law, and law is merely another name for the divine order of

Nature. Whatever foundation for Natural Religion, for faith in God as

the Creator and Governor of the world, is afforded by the existing order

of the world, it is in no degree logically weakened (though it may be

practically) by viewing that order as reached by a process of evolution,

since that process also must have been designed, planned, adapted to its

purpose, and divinely superintended.

Accordingly, we find that many philosophers, and some divines,

acknowledge a process of the evolution of God's great idea, and adore

him for the growth alike of forests and firmaments, regarding evolution,

thus conditioned, as profoundly religious. St. Augustine, and St. Thomas

Aquinas, of old, and many modern speculators, have assented to the

theory of evolution as perfectly consistent with belief in God, as its

Author. It is utterly illogical to allege that evolution has banished

final causes. Grant it all its facts, and these facts proclaim God.

It is evident, however, that evolutionists are not confident of the

ability of the facts which they are able to allege to sustain their

theory, since they are perpetually postulating assumptions necessary to

their argument, but which are utterly unproved, and incapable of proof.

Mr. Darwin is the most notorious offender against inductive science in

this respect. I have now before me a list of eighty-six assumptions of

this sort in the Origin of Species alone. Those in his other works are

too numerous to mention. He continually mistakes his own assertions, or

even his own mere conjectures, for proof, and refers back to them, and

builds further assumptions upon them accordingly; and he assumes facts

unproven and incapable of proof; and principles which he must know are

denied by his opponents. We can only take a few instances at random.

He assumes that all dogs are developed from wolves (Descent of Man, page

48); that the instincts of animals are developed (page 38); that

language was developed (page 53); that there is a wider interval between

the lamprey and the ape than between the ape and the man, thus begging

the question of man's brutality (page 34); that the savage is the

original state of man (page 63); that parental instincts are the result

of Natural Selection, after owning utter ignorance of their origin (page

77); that the ideas of glory and infamy are the workings of sympathy

(page 82); the heredity of moral tastes (page 98); that the standard of

morality has been rising since the giving of the ten commandments (page

99); that our ancestors were quadrupeds (page 116); that there have been

thousands of generations (page 125); that breeds have the character of

species (Origin of Species, page 411); that rudimentary organs are

inherited abortions (page 424); that there are four or five original

progenitors, and distant evidence of only one (page 425); he assumes

descent to prove his geology (page 428); and perpetual progress toward

perfection (pages 59, 140, 176, 428), in the face of his own facts of

retrogression.

Then look at the outrageous character of the assumption that beneficial

variations may be added up indefinitely, that is, to infinity. Because a

gymnast can leap over two horses, can his son leap over three? and his

son over four? and his son over five? and can we in time breed a man who

will leap to the moon? And yet the whole theory is based upon

forgetfulness of the maxim, that there is a limit to all things, and of

the fact, that in creatures of flesh and blood this limit is very soon

reached.

Look again at the utterly erroneous assumption that the tendency of the

struggle for life is to improve the combatants; an assumption

contradicted by the whole history of famine, war, pauperism, and

disease, among brutes and men. Were the survivors of the Irish famine of

1847, or those of the Persian, or Bengali famines improved by their

struggle for life? It is true the fittest survived; but that was all;

they were miserably emaciated and demoralized. Were the peasantry of

Europe improved by the wars of the French Revolution? On the contrary,

though the fittest survived, France was obliged to lower the recruiting

standard three inches. In all cases the struggle for life injures all

concerned.

And yet upon these two fundamental assumptions the theory is built; of

which that of the indefinite accumulation of small profitable variations

is outrageously impossible and absurd; and the other, of the improvement

of breeds by starvation and hardships, is contrary to all observation

and experience! Take away these two assumptions, and the whole theory of

the gradual improvement of plants and animals by such agency vanishes.

There is no such power of indefinite improvement by Natural Selection,

as Mr. Darwin asserts. The utmost it can do is to keep breeds up to the

natural standard, or near to it, by destroying the weakest; but at the

same time it weakens the strongest also. Were there no other objection,

this one would be fatal, that Mr. Darwin assigns an elevating power to a

depressing agency, and asserts war, famine, hardship, and disease as his

holy angels perfecting progress.

Mr. Darwin presents the most preposterous assumptions with such coolness

and apparent unconsciousness of their utter improbability to his

readers, and with such an entire ignoring of the necessity of any

further attestation than his own _ipse dixit_, as to warrant serious

suspicions of his sanity. Take, for instance, his bear and whale story.

Hearne reports having seen in the Arctic regions a bear swimming in the

water for hours, with his mouth wide open, catching flies; and Mr.

Darwin says if the supply of flies were constant (where the winter lasts

eight months of the year 40° below zero) _he can see no difficulty in

the production at length of an animal as monstrous as a whale_! M.

Comte's disciples never suspected their master's sanity till he invented

a religion for them.

2. This theory, it should be remembered, is _merely a theory_, _a mere

notion_, _a hypothesis_. It is not even alleged that it is based upon

facts actually discovered. The alleged facts of the cooling of the

nebulæ, the chemical origin of life upon our globe, and the development

of the original Ascidian into the fish, and that into the monkey, and of

the monkey into the man, never were witnessed by anybody, nor could they

be witnessed. La Place was honest enough to call his part of the theory,

The Nebular _Hypothesis_. He had no idea of claiming for it the rank of

a fact of science upon which he, or anybody else, might build a system.

Nor are the modern assertors of evolution able to establish a single

instance of the chemical origin of life at the present day; though

thousands of experiments have been made attempting that exploit, by

English, French, and German chemists during the last forty years. Nor

has a single case of the transmutation of species ever been observed in

wild animals or plants; nor has any change of species been produced in

tame ones by domestication or culture. No naturalist has seen a

community of apes in the process of improvement toward manhood; nor has

any philologist described the first attempts of the monkeys toward the

articulation of language, or the manufacture of clothing, unless we

except Mr. Lemuel Gulliver's interesting account of the Yahoos. It must

be acknowledged that the animals described by that accurate observer,

and graphic describer, approach more nearly to those required by Mr.

Darwin's theory than any ever seen before, or since. Hence it is greatly

to be desired that some scientific evolutionists should thoroughly

explore those regions, investigate the manners and customs of the Yahoos

with the enthusiasm of a true Darwinian, and minutely describe those

interesting features which would enable us to decide whether they are

monkeys progressing to manhood, or men brutalizing into apehood; but

which Mr. Gulliver's lack of scientific enthusiasm for evolution

prevented him from closely examining. But until the scientific standing

of Mr. Gulliver's Yahoos is determined, the theory of evolution must be

assigned to the mountains of speculations, big with expectation, but

which yet await the birth of their first fact.

Mr. Darwin indeed alleges the results of domestication upon animals and

plants, as producing permanent varieties as different in appearance as

many which are ranked by naturalists as different species, and he

alleges that Natural Selection carries on a similar process of

improvement among wild animals and plants.

But the facts of domestication are most emphatic in refusing to

acknowledge any change of species of the most carefully bred animals.

The efforts of breeders have been exerted for thousands of years upon

the dog, the ox, the goat, the sheep, and the ass, the horse, and the

camel, among animals; and upon the goose, the duck, and the pigeon, and

for a shorter time, but still for two thousand years, upon the common

barn-door poultry. Farmers in all lands, since the deluge, have used

their best exertions to improve the cereals, the fruit trees, the vines,

and root crops, and vegetables, and the result has been some valuable

modifications of size, shape, flavor, and fertility; but in no case

whatever has any change of species been effected. All the efforts of

breeders have not succeeded in making the horse specifically different

from the noble animal described in the Book of Job four thousand years

ago. The sheep has not become a goat, nor the goat a sheep, by all the

pains of all the shepherds since the days of Abel. The ass displays not

the least tendency to become a horse, nor the goat to become a cow. Mr.

Darwin makes great capital out of pigeons, enumerating all the varieties

owned by fanciers, and showing how the Indian emperors bred them a

thousand years before Christ. But it is strange that he does not see

that this makes against his theory; since in all that time this most

variable of birds has never been transmuted into any other species. The

pigeon has never been changed into a crow, or a magpie, or a woodpecker,

or a chicken; has never, in fact, become anything else than a pigeon.

Dogs are also somewhat variable in their varieties, and Mr. Darwin

relies greatly upon supposed variations from some one assumed ancestral

pair of dogs, into the greyhound, mastiff, terrier, and lapdog. But

granting all these unproven variations, no instance is alleged of a dog

ever becoming a cat or a lion by any care or culture.

It will not do to allege, that, for anything we know to the contrary,

our present breeds of domestic animals and plants may be so different

from those called by the same names in ancient times as to be really

different species.

We do know many things to the contrary. In the tombs of the Egyptians,

and the sculptures of the Assyrians, we have pictures of the various

plants, birds, and animals, from three to four thousand years old, as

well as of man, the most domestic animal of the whole. These paintings

and sculptures assure us that in all those millenniums domestication has

not produced the slightest change in the races of animals, plants, or

men. The Ethiopian has not changed his skin, nor the leopard his spots.

The negro was then the same black-skinned, woolly-headed, flat-nosed,

thick-lipped, long-heeled person he is to-day, as pompous, good-humored,

and fond of finery. The Assyrian statues are good, recognizable

likenesses of eminent living Jewish merchants, in London and New

Orleans. The old Pharaohs of the monuments can be matched for face and

figure any day in the bazars of Cairo. The greyhound of the tombs is the

same variety now used for coursing hares in the desert. The camel, the

ass, and the Arab, and Assyrian breeds of horses, have not been at all

improved in forty centuries. Even Mr. Darwin's favorite pigeons would

seem to have ceased to vary; for the carrier-pigeons let loose by

Sesostris, to carry the news of his coronation to all the cities of

Egypt, do not differ a feather from the modern Egyptian carrier-pigeons.

The various wild animals, and many of the plants, are represented on

these monuments in great variety. Among these I have noted the lotus,

the papyrus, the leek, the palm, wheat, barley, and millet; the

crocodile, the frog, the crane, the flamingo, the ibis, the goose, the

owl, the ostrich, the peacock; and of beasts the now famous ancestral

ape, Ptolemy's tame lion, the leopard, the gazelle, the hippopotamus,

the giraffe, and the wild boar, and many others. But there is not the

least perceptible change in the corresponding species now inhabiting

Egypt and the desert.

We can go further than the mere external appearance; for we can actually

dissect specimens of the various animals, and thus satisfy ourselves

whether any physiological change, amounting to a transmutation of

species, has occurred, or was in progress; and the investigation has

been conducted by no less a physiologist and zoologist than Cuvier,

whose authority in such matters no naturalist will dispute. And this is

what he says: "It might seem as if the ancient Egyptians had been

inspired by nature, for the purpose of transmitting to after ages a

monument of her natural history. That strange and whimsical people, by

embalming with so much care the brutes which were the objects of their

stupid adoration, have left us in their sacred grottoes cabinets of

zoology almost complete. Climate has conspired with art to preserve the

bodies from corruption, and we can now assure ourselves with our own

eyes what was the state of a good number of species three thousand years

ago. * * * I have endeavored to collect all the ancient documents

respecting the forms of animals, and there are none equal to those

furnished by the Egyptians, both in regard to their antiquity and

abundance. I have examined with the greatest care the engraved figures

of quadrupeds and birds upon the obelisks brought from Egypt to ancient

Rome; and all these figures, one with another, have a perfect

resemblance to their intended objects, such as they still are in our

days. My learned friend, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, convinced me of the

importance of this research, and carefully collected in the tombs and

temples of Upper and Lower Egypt as many mummies of animals as he could

procure. He has brought home the mummies of cats, ibises, birds of prey,

dogs, crocodiles, and the head of a bull. After the most attentive and

detailed examination, not the smallest difference is to be perceived

between these animals and those of the same species which we now see,

any more than between human mummies and skeletons of men of the present

day."[17]

There is then not the first fact, or appearance of a fact, to be adduced

in proof of the change of species either by domestication, or Natural

Selection, or any other process known to man. That any such evolution of

any animal, or plant, into one of another species ever occurred, is a

mere empty notion, in support of which no facts can be adduced. All the

animals and plants of which we know anything have remained unchanged

since the beginning of man's observation of them. The theory endeavors

to account for a change which never happened. It is a mere empty dream,

unworthy of a serious consideration by any mind imbued with the first

principle of inductive science--namely, that all science is the orderly

knowledge of facts; and whose first rule is, _first ascertain your

facts_.

But it is urged, that though such a change has not occurred during the

brief period of human history, it may have been practicable in the

lengthened periods revealed by geology, and while the forces of nature

were more vigorous during the youth of our planet. This, in fact, is the

grand resource of the modern evolutionists--the almost infinite periods

and possibilities of geology.

We refuse, however, to follow Mr. Powell into those unexplored realms of

the infinite past and discuss the possibilities of ages, of which "by

the conditions we can not know anything whatever." We will go as far as

the geological strata furnish us with any facts, any evidences of life,

any traces of plants or animals of which corresponding species still

exist, and will unhesitatingly affirm, on the authority of the most

eminent geologists, that such geological representatives of existing

species furnish no evidence whatever of evolution into higher forms. On

the contrary, we shall show that many species have existed without the

slightest change for many thousands, aye, and millions of years,

sufficiently long to establish the fact of the permanence of species

during the geologic ages known to man.

Geologists are generally agreed that the first Florida Coral Reef is at

least 30,000 years old; but Agassiz asserts, uncontradicted, that the

insect which built it has not altered in the least in that period, and

he says regarding it: "These facts furnish evidence, as direct as we can

obtain in any branch of physical inquiry, that some at least of the

species of animals now existing have been in existence 30,000 years, and

have not undergone the slightest change in that period." But we can go

still further back, and demonstrate the permanence of vegetable

structure. Hugh Miller says: "The oak, the birch, the hazel, the Scotch

fir, all lived, I repeat, in what is now Britain, ere the last great

depression of the land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhinoceros,

extinct for untold ages, forced their way through the tangled branches;

and the British tiger and hyena harbored in their thickets. Cuvier

framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds

and beasts of the catacombs were identical in every respect with the

animals of the same kind that live now. But what, it has been asked, is

a brief period of 3,000 years, when compared with the geologic ages? Or

how could any such argument be founded on a basis so little extended? It

is, however, to no such narrow basis that we can refer in the case of

these woods. All human history is comprised in the nearer corner of the

immense period they measure out; and yet from their first appearance in

creation till now, they have not altered a single fiber. And such on

this point is the invariable testimony of Paleontologic science,

testimony so invariable that no great Paleontologist was ever yet an

asserter of the Development Hypothesis."[18] To the same purpose let us

hear Huxley's testimony, since no one will suspect him of undue respect

for Moses: "Obviously if the earliest fossiliferous rocks now known are

coeval with the commencement of life, and if their contents give us any

just conception of the earliest fauna and flora, the insignificant

amount of modification which can be demonstrated to have taken place in

any one group of animals and plants, is quite incompatible with the

hypothesis that all living forms are the results of a process of

necessary progressive development entirely comprised within the time

represented by the fossiliferous rocks."[19]

We are fully warranted, then, in alleging, that no such transmutation of

species is known to science, as an existing fact, or as having ever

occurred.

As to the supposition on which the evolutionists fall back, that such a

miracle might have happened thousands of millions of years before the

formation of the lowest rocks known to us, we might well decline the

discussion of may-be's as facts of science.

But there is a positive denial of unimaginable periods of time for Mr.

Darwin's evolution to try its blundering experiments. We are empowered

to say positively, No! There is no such length of time for you, Mr.

Darwin, on this little globe at least. This rotating world had a

beginning; so had our moon; and our sun, too, began to burn one day. And

there are data of the revolution of these bodies, and of the secular

cooling of the earth, and of the gradual combustion of the sun, and of

the retardation of the earth's motions, from which Sir Wm. Thompson (in

his Treatise on Geological Time) calculates, that our earth has not been

in a fit state for plants and animals for more than a hundred millions

of years; and he demonstrates the absurdity of the demand for unlimited

time, as contradictory to the facts of physical astronomy. Hence we deny

the possibility of evolution in the infinite ages of the past. There

never were any such ages on this world of ours.

4. Failing to find facts, evolutionists fall back upon analogies, and

support their hypothesis by the supposed analogy of the _growth of the

embryos of all plants and animals from germs alleged to be originally

perfectly similar_--simple protoplasm cells, which by subsequent

evolution, differentiate themselves as widely as the moss from the man.

The subject is too obscure for popular discussion. I can only announce

the results of the latest and most authoritative researches.[20]

1. Analogy is a very unsafe guide here, because the differences between

the limited life of the individual, and the alleged unlimited life of

the race, are precisely those of which we have no analogy.

2. It is not true that "the original substratum or material is in every

instance alike," nor that the "primordial cell is in every instance the

same," whether of the "lichen or the man;"[21] nor as others allege,

"that chemical reagents detect no differences between them." Chemical

reagents are very clumsy instruments for the analysis of living beings,

and their properties and powers; which are the antagonists of chemical

reactions. Nevertheless, heat is a well-known chemical agent, and the

application of heat to a fertilized, and to an unfertilized, germ

develops a whole world of difference between them. The one becomes a

chicken, the other an addled egg. Moreover, the application of different

degrees of heat to different germs produces the most various reactions.

The germs of trout are speedily killed by the moderate temperature of

65° Fahrenheit, while the germs of most animalculæ and plants develop

rapidly at that temperature. Such instances might be multiplied, but

these are sufficient to contradict the rash assertion of sameness,

because a hasty observer did not take pains to discover differences.

3. There are four distinct plans of structure in the animal kingdom, and

at least three, perhaps more, in the vegetable kingdom; and every germ,

from the first instant when its evolution can be seen at all, is seen to

develop only according to its own proper method. There is no more

confusion of germs, or embryos, than of plants or animals.

4. No instance has ever been known of a germ producing an animal, or

plant, of another species, by any process of stopping short of ripening,

or undue prolongation of it. Every seed breeds true to its kind, or not

at all, or produces a deformity. Embryology utterly refuses the notion

of the transmutation of species.

Mr. Darwin's various references to rudimentary organs, like the bones of

a hand in the flipper of the whale, or the teats of male animals, and

the like, can hardly be called arguments. He tries to account for them

and fails; acknowledging ignorance of the laws of heredity. Some of them

he will have to be young organs in process of evolution, others organs

aborted for want of exercise. In this category he ought to place the

tail which he ought to have inherited from his ancestors, as he is

greatly exercised to know what became of it. But it is evident that his

attempts to build arguments on such things, and to account for

occasional variations by atarism, are in contradiction to his

principles. Most of the known instances of the origination of permanent

varieties were not the result of infinitesimal improvements, but were

sudden and complete at once. The Japan peacocks, the short-legged

sheep, the porcupine man and his family, and the six-fingered men, were

not at all the results of a slow process of evolution; on the contrary,

they were born so, complete at once, in utter contradiction of the

theory.

5. The only other line of argument, which has any show of probability,

is that based upon _the gradations of the various orders of plants and

animals_. Not but that there are many other arguments adduced, but they

are of too technical a character to be intelligible to any but

zoologists, and of too little weight to demand consideration after the

leading arguments are overturned. But this argument from gradation,

though logically unsound, is plausibly specious, and therefore demands

notice.

By far the ablest exhibition of this argument is that made by Lamarck,

and we give it as he presents it: "The greater the abundance of natural

objects assembled together, the more do we discover proofs that

everything passes by insensible shades into something else; that even

the more remarkable differences are evanescent, and that nature has for

the most part left us nothing at our disposal for establishing

distinctions, save trifling, and in some respects puerile

particularities. We find that many genera among plants and animals are

of such an extent, in consequence of the number of species referred to

them, that the study and determination of these last have become almost

impracticable. When the species are arranged in a series, and placed

near to each other, with a due regard to their natural affinities, they

each differ in so minute a degree from those next adjoining, that they

almost melt into each other, and are in a manner confounded together. If

we see isolated species, we may presume the absence of some more closely

connected, and which have not yet been discovered. Already there are

genera, and even entire orders, nay, whole classes which present this

state of things." He then goes on to present, "as a guide to

conjecture," what his successors now assert as a fact: "In the first

place, if we examine the whole series of known animals, from one

extremity to the other, when they are arranged in the order of their

natural relations, we find that we may pass progressively, or at least

with very few interruptions, from beings of more simple to those of more

compound structure; and in proportion as the complexity of their

organization increases, the number and dignity of their faculties

increase also. Among plants a similar approximation to a graduated scale

of being is apparent. Secondly, it appears, from geological

observations, that plants and animals of more simple organization

existed on the globe before the appearance of those of more compound

structure, and the latter were successively formed at more modern

periods, each new race being more fully developed than the most perfect

of the preceding one."[22]

From this gradation of nature, thus stated, the evolutionists go on to

infer genealogy, the birth descent of the larger from the smaller, and

of the more complex from the simpler forms, as the only scientific

explanation. But it is by no means the only scientific explanation of

the order of nature. The best naturalists, from Moses to Agassiz, have

regarded the order of nature as the development of the divine idea, have

prosecuted their researches on that view, and have regarded that as a

sufficient and scientific explanation of the gradation of plants and

animals, as they actually exist.

The idea of birth descent can not be logically connected with that of

gradation; especially with a gradation upward. Were the order of nature

such as Lamarck describes, how could any man logically infer the birth

descent of each of its classes from the next below? Here is an

ironmonger's sample card of wood screws, beginning with those

one-quarter of an inch long, and proceeding by gradations of

one-sixteenth of an inch to those of four inches. Does the gradation

show that the little ones begot the big ones? It may be said the wood

screws do not beget progeny. Well, here is a hill containing

twenty-three potatoes, weighing from half an ounce to half a pound, and

quite regularly graded. Did the small potatoes beget the big ones? The

inference of birth descent from gradation is utterly illogical, and of a

piece with the incoherency which we have seen in the other parts of the

theory. It never could be inferred from the facts stated, even did

nature correspond to Lamarck's description.

But nature does not correspond to Lamarck's description. That

description corresponded moderately, perhaps, to the science of his day,

which was based chiefly upon external resemblances; but no scientific

naturalist of the present day would accept it as a correct statement of

the facts revealed by modern science.

In the first place there is no such imperceptible blending and shading

off of species as the description would imply, obliterating all

distinctions of species, and rendering it impossible even for a

naturalist to distinguish one species from another. Since the time of

Lamarck, structure and physiology have been more studied than mere

external appearances; so that from a tooth or bone Cuvier or Agassiz

could reconstruct an animal, and indicate its internal organization, as

well as its form and habits. But even in Lamarck's days, and even to the

most uneducated, there was no such imperceptible shading and blending as

the theory requires. It is well to look here at its requirements, for

they are not fully presented by its friends. Mr. Darwin gives us a

diagram exhibiting the variation of an original species into a score or

so of varieties, ending in distinct species. But this is very far,

indeed, below the necessities of the case. The horse hair worm lays

8,000,000 of eggs; and the primeval germ, whatever it was, could hardly

be less fertile, since fertility increases with simplicity of structure.

But, taking 8,000,000 to begin with, here were as many varieties; since

no two of them, or of any creature, could be exactly alike. The next

generation would give 8,000,000 times as many varieties, and so on till

Natural Selection began to thin off the feeble. But here we have,

instead of a few well-marked varieties, an infinite multitude of

imperceptible variations, rendering classification impossible. And as

all these were only varieties of the same breed, they would breed

together, and thus still more confuse the complexity, and render

distinction of species impossible. For, in spite of all Mr. Darwin has

to say about the extinction of the weaker varieties, the fact is, they

are not at all extinguished, but keep their ground as well as the higher

classes, or perhaps better. And if a snail, or a worm, can contrive to

live now in an unimproved condition, why should its improving cousin die

off? Did its improvement kill it? And so of improving mollusks, and

well-doing radiates, and aspiring rabbits, and all the rest. The world

ought to be so full of them that no man could sort them off into

species, or tell which was fish, which was flesh, and which red herring;

and no pork packer could distinguish hog from dog.

But instead of any such horrible confusion of a world full of mongrels,

we discover a clear and well defined distinction of species, known even

to the poor animals themselves, and by their instincts made known to all

mankind. The Creator, who created all creatures after their kind,

implanted in them an instinct of breeding only with their own species;

and placed a bar in the way of man's vain attempts to work confusion of

species, by rendering the hybrid offspring of different species sterile,

or only capable of breeding back to the pure blood. Innumerable attempts

have been made by fraud and force to procure cross breeds of different

species of plants and animals, but always with the same result--the

extinction of the progeny of the hybrid, unless bred back to nature.

While a mingling of various breeds of the same species--horses, sheep,

or cattle--generally increases fertility, the attempt to mingle

different species, as the horse and the ass, though so similar, always

produces sterile offspring. It is impossible to conceive any form in

which the Creator could more emphatically protest against the attempt to

confuse the distinctions of species He established.

God has fixed a barrier against the mixture or confusion of species by

cross breeding, by ordaining the sterility of hybrids. Mr. Darwin labors

in vain to explain away this great fact. It can not be explained into

conformity with the evolution theory; for in that theory all species are

only breeds or varieties of one species, and ought to increase their

fertility by cross breeding. With all scientific naturalists, as with

all people of common sense, this proves that species have a distinct

existence in nature, and that the Creator has ordained the continuance

of their distinct existence; which is the denial of evolution.

When Mr. Darwin retreats into the geologic ages, and confessing that his

principle has ceased to be operative now in our world, and refers us to

them for such evolution of one species from another, he abandons the

fundamental principle of his school--the uniformity of nature--and falls

back on Christian ground the necessity for supernatural origins. He

virtually admits the death or superannuation of Natural Selection, since

it has retired from the business of species-making.

But when we go back to those old geologic ages, we find that species

were then not only as distinct as now, but that the distinctions were

even bolder and more visible. Many of them have ceased to exist, but

they have left their shells, their petrified casts, and their bones, by

which we can see that they stood apart in well-defined groups, without

any such blending and confusion as the evolution theory asserts. Over

three thousand species are already classified. Between every two of them

there ought to be, on Mr. Darwin's showing, a hundred intermediate

variations at the least; and between some of the more widely separated

forms there ought to be thousands of intermediate varieties; as for

instance between the bear and the whale; and a still greater number

between the mollusk with its external shell, and the vertebrate with its

internal skeleton. And we ought to find these intermediate forms closely

connected with their parents and their children. For intermediate forms

in another continent could not be the connecting links between the

mollusks and vertebrates of a distant country, say of England. In the

same strata in which we find the two ends of the chain, and lying

between the two ends of the chain, we ought to find the connecting

links. And we ought to find a hundred connecting links for every

specimen of distinct species, since Mr. Darwin alleges that they must

have lived and died somewhere; and we have seen they must have lived and

died right there where they were born, and where they begot their

progeny. The geological strata ought to be full of connecting links.

But when we come to look for them they are not there. Geology knows

nothing about them. It has plenty of distinct, well-defined

species--trilobites, and ammonites, and echinoderms, palms, ferns, firs,

and mosses, all sorts of quadrupeds from a mouse to a mastodon, and all

just as clean-cut and well-defined as the species of existing animals.

Mr. Darwin can not find his connecting links between the species, which

ought to have been a hundred times more plentiful than the species they

connected. These connecting links are missing links. He ought to be able

to overwhelm his opponents, and bury them under mountains of the bones

of intermediate species. But all his friends can do is to suggest about

half a dozen, while he needs three hundred thousand. He can not pay half

a cent on the dollar. In his grief he turns round and abuses the

defectiveness of the geological record, which he says he could never

have suspected of being so defective but for this failure to meet his

drafts. But he need not blame the geological record for not preserving

bones of animals which never lived. Geology says there never was any

such confusion of species as evolution asserts.

But not only does the general structure of the web of nature present a

clearly striped pattern, instead of the mottled gray of the

theory--neither the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end is like what

the evolution theory would produce.

The gradation does not begin, as the theory asserts and demands, with

the monads. On the contrary, we find that there are four kingdoms of

animal life--in an ascending scale--the radiate, or starfish; the

mollusk or oyster; the articulate, or insect; and the vertebrate, or

animals with backbones. Now the evolution ought to have begun at the

bottom, with the radiate, the coral, and the starfish; it should have

gone upward, the coral developing into the oyster, and the oyster into

the lobster, and the lobster into the salmon, and so on. But instead of

that we discover, away down in the Silurian strata, at the very

beginning of life, _all the four kingdoms_--the radiates, the mollusks,

the articulates, and the fish! Evidently, then, there was no such

beginning of the world as evolutionists suppose.

Then as we work upward along the line of march, and of the development

of the divine idea, we observe that when new species were introduced,

they did not work up slowly from small and weak beginnings; beginning

with dwarfs and growing up to giants; but, on the contrary, the giants

head the column. The geological books are full of them--sharks forty

feet long, frogs as big as oxen, ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus of

fabulous proportions--were not their skeletons preserved--pterodactyles,

or bats, as big as a dog, the mastodon giganteus, beside which an

ordinary modern elephant is like a Shetland pony beside a dray horse,

ferns as big as oak trees, and mosses eighteen inches in diameter, shell

fish of the nautilus order the size of dinner plates, and crustaceans,

cousins to the lobster, three feet long. And all this at the very first

start in life of these respective families, and in overwhelming

multitudes. That was no age of small beginnings, and small progressive

improvements. On the contrary, these old families, like some other old

families, seem to have rather lost rank, and bulk, and influence; at

least their modern representatives cut no such figure in the world as

their predecessors.

As we proceed along the line we meet gaps which slay the theory of

genealogical descent altogether. A gap is fatal to it. If a family dies

out, that is the end of it. You can not resuscitate it after a few

centuries, and go on with that breed; much less can you pick up a breed

quite different, and attach it to your old genealogy. But in the line of

evolution we meet these fatal gaps; and no evolutionist has bridged

them, because they can not possibly be bridged.

The first great gap is the abyss between death and life. No human power

can cross it. How could the chemical actions of dead matter infuse

vitality into the first germ, or bud of a plant? For chemical actions

are the antagonists of life, and constantly laboring to destroy the

living organism, and finally they succeed. There is no process of

evolution known to man which can carry evolution across this abyss. But

till evolution crosses this gulf it can not even begin to operate. This

first abyss is its grave.

But, supposing life begun in the plant first, as the theory requires,

there is another gap between the life of the plant and that of the

animal; for all animal life is sustained by another sort of food than

that which feeds the vegetable. The vegetable feeds solely on chemical,

unorganized matters; the animal solely on matter organized, on some

plant, or on some other animal which feeds on plants. No animal can live

on the food of plants. Here then is another gap which can not be bridged

over, nor crossed; for the plant in process of conversion into an animal

is in process of starvation, and when the process is about to be

completed, it will end like the miser's horse, whose master diminished

his oats Darwinianly, a single grain a day, until he had brought him to

live on just one grain per day, when, alas! the victim of the experiment

died. And so ends evolution experiment No. 2.

Then we come on a multitude of gaps, breaks in the uniformity of nature,

called for by the evolutionists, between the species which will not

breed together. There ought to be no such species on the theory; or, if

there are, there ought to be a multitude of intervening varieties toning

down the interval; for instance, between the horse and the cow, and

between the sheep and the hog. All the ingenuity of all the

evolutionists has been tasked in vain to produce any instance of the

confusion of two such species, or of the production of a new true

species by the intermixture of blood. But they might just as well try to

convert iron into gold, or sulphur into carbon. In fact, evolution is

the modern physiological form of the old chemical superstition, alchemy,

substituting for the transmutation of metals the problem of the

transmutation of animals.

It were endless to attempt to exhibit the impossibilities of crossing

the gaps between the water-breathing fish and the air-breathing animal;

between the flying-bird and the quadruped; between instinct and

education; between brute selfishness and maternal affection; between the

habits of the solitary and those of the gregarious, and those of the

colonial insects and animals. No one of these is accounted for

satisfactorily by the theory of evolution. But space forbids the

attempt.

We only cite one other gulf which the theory can not cross: the gulf

between the brute and the man. We should rather say the three gulfs; for

between man's body and that of the brute there is a gap which Natural

Selection can not cross; another between man's intellectual powers and

those of brutes; and the third, and widest of all, between his

conscience and their brutal appetites.

The gulf between man's body and that of any brute is marked along the

whole line, from the solid basis of the feet, enabling him to stand

erect, look upward and behold the stars; along the line of the stiff

backbone, maintaining the dignified posture; to the hands, on which

treatises have been written, displaying their wonderful superiority over

those of all other creatures, and enabling man to do what no other

animal has done, to fill the world with his handiworks, and alter the

very face of nature with his ax, and spade, and steam engine. His tongue

and organs of articulate speech alone, were there no other

characteristic, proclaim him different from all other animals; none of

those resembling him in outward form making the slightest attempts

toward articulate language or being able to do so.

Man alone, of all the animals, possesses no natural covering, but is

exposed naked to the inclemency of the elements. What little hair he

possesses is chiefly on the breast, where it is of little use as a

covering, and on the head, which in other animals is never better

protected than the body. Mr. Darwin alleges that the first men were

hairy, like apes. Well, how did they lose their hair? Not by Natural

Selection, which only perpetuates _profitable_ variations; but the loss

of hair to an ape would be as unprofitable as the loss of your clothes

to you. Not by Sexual Selection, for there is not the slightest evidence

that nudity was ever popular in apedom. We have undoubted evidence, in

the two bone needles found with the bones of the man of Mentone, that

the primeval men were naked, and complete proof that Natural Selection

could not effect such a disadvantageous change had they been hairy.

Here, then, we have an _inferiority_ to other animals in the animal

structure, strangely at variance with the general superiority, and only

to be accounted for as an educational provision.

But chiefly in the human head does the great outward distinction appear.

The brain is the great instrument with which the mind works. You can

gauge the strength of Ulysses by his bow, and the bulk of the giant by

the staff of his spear, which was like a weaver's beam. The brain of the

largest ape is about thirty two cubic inches. The brains of the wildest

Australians are more than double that capacity. They measure from

seventy-five inches to ninety. Europeans' brains measure from ninety to

one hundred inches. There are instances of Esquimaux measuring over

ninety. Even the brain of an idiot is double the size of that of the

orang-otang. But how did man get this extraordinary development of

brain, far beyond his necessities? For the cave man of Mentone, who

hunted the bison, had as good a head as Bismarck. Natural Selection

could not develop an ape's brain in advance of his necessities. But here

we have a prophetic structure; man's head developed far in advance of

his necessities. Here is a power at work superior to Natural Selection.

With such an instrument man has gone to work and supplied his

deficiencies. Inferior to many animals in strength and speed, he has

manufactured weapons, and subdued them all, asserting himself as the

lord of creation, conquering even the mighty mastodon, and piercing the

huge Caledonian whale with his reindeer harpoon. He has remedied his

want of hair by the manufacture of clothing from the spoils of his

victims. He has rendered himself independent of the weather by the

shelter of his house. He has ceased to be dependent on the spontaneous

fruits of the forest by the cultivation of the soil, and so has become a

cosmopolite, confined to no province of creation. He has constructed

ships, and provisioned them for long voyages, and visited, and colonized

every coast of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. He has

formed civilized societies with laws, government, and religion. He has

leveled roads, navigated rivers, tunneled mountains, dug navigable

canals, constructed steamboats, built railroads, invented electric

telegraphs, and steam printing presses; and generally he has developed

ideas of society, nationality, and of the universal brotherhood of man,

not only not possible under the laws of Natural Selection, but in the

most direct contrariety to those laws, which work only for the benefit

of the individual. Never under those laws could any great community of

animals be formed, never could they obtain the notion of representative

government, never combine their powers for any national enterprise, nor

could the most hairy and muscular-tailed of Mr. Darwin's ancestors

secure subscribers sufficient to warrant him in starting even a county

newspaper.

But it is in the moral sense which enables man to distinguish right from

wrong, the conscience, which forbids and reproves the unbridled

indulgence of the animal appetites, that we observe the grand

distinction between man and the brute. There is nothing in the writings

of evolutionists more pitiable than their attempts to degrade conscience

into a mere gregarious instinct, an outcome of utility to the tribe, and

to pleasurable sensations, resulting from the exercise of the social

instincts. It would appear that these writers had so sophisticated their

own minds that they have ceased to understand the fundamental,

world-wide difference between right and gain, between duty and pleasure.

"Do justice, though the heavens fall," could never be evolved by Natural

Selection. That is the law of the sharpest tooth, and the longest claws,

and the biggest bull; the Napoleonic theology, whose god is always on

the side of the strongest battalions; the law of the perdition of the

weak, and the survival of the strongest. In obedience to its laws the

birds forsake their parents as soon as they can shift for themselves;

the herd tramples down the wounded deer; the wolves devour their wounded

brothers; the queen bee puts her sisters to death, and the neuters

sacrifice all the males of the hive. In obedience to the laws of Natural

Selection, the males fight for the most attractive females, and keep as

many as they can, and form societies on that basis.

But man has a sense of justice, and mercy, and gratitude, and love. Here

is an animal who knows he ought to tell truth, and do right, and honor

his parents, and respect and love his brethren. Whether he always does

his duty or not, he feels and owns he ought to do it. Justice, and

mercy, and the fear of God, are not at all the attributes of brutes, and

never could have been produced by the evolution of their instincts. No

animal possesses any knowledge of God, nor practices any form of

religious worship. Religion, then, could not be the evolution of what

has no existence.

We have now considered the theory of the atheistical evolution of man,

and of all plants and animals from one primeval germ, by the

unintelligent operation of the powers of nature. We have seen that there

are as many contradictory applications of the theory as there are

advocates of it; that in any shape it is incoherent, illogical, and

absurd; that it is destitute of any support from facts; that the alleged

analogy of embryology fails to give it countenance; that the order of

nature in its gradations is contradictory of the theory; that it utterly

fails to account for the origin of life, for the distinctness of the

four classes of the animal kingdom, for the distinctness of species

which refuse to breed together, for the absence of the intermediate

forms necessary to the theory; and, above all, that it can give no

satisfactory account of man's bodily, mental, and moral superiority to

all other animals, nor for his possession of a knowledge of God.

Its tendency, moreover, is inevitably to degrade man, to destroy that

sense of his dignity which is the principal security of human life, to

obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and

in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and so to

promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of men to

the level of brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal

instincts. For all these reasons we reject the theory as unscientific,

absurd, degrading to man, and offensive to the God who made him.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The Descent of Man, p. 198, American Edition.

[6] The Descent of Man, p. 191, Am. Ed.

[7] Descent of Man, p. 199, Am. Ed.

[8] Descent of Man, 197, Am. Ed.

[9] The Variations of Animals, etc., Vol. II. page 515.

[10] Lay Sermons, p. 30.

[11] Lay Sermons, 303.

[12] Cited by Hodge in "What is Darwinism?" Page 73, etc.

[13] Natural Selection, 372 A., Am. Ed.

[14] From the _Presbyterian_, December 7, 1872.

[15] Origin of Species, 4, 10, 127, 9, 97, 100, 409, 410, 415, 423.

Descent of Man, 192, 204, and II.--15, 257.

[16] Natural Selection, p. 365. Am. Ed.

[17] Theory of the Earth, 123.

[18] Testimony of the Rocks, 77.

[19] Address at Annual Meeting of the Geological Society, 1862.

[20] Agassiz's Methods of Study.

[21] Draper's Human Physiology, 506.

[22] Lyell's Principles of Geology, Book III., Chapter 33.