h have obtained so great currency may bear. The long
time employed in the introduction of the lower animals, the use of the
terms "make" and "form," instead of "create," and the expression "let
the waters bring forth," may well be understood as countenancing some
form of mediate creation, or of "creation by law," or "theistic
evolution," as it has been termed; but they give no countenance to the
idea either of the spontaneous evolution of living beings under the
influence of merely physical causes and without creative intervention,
or of the transmutation of one kind of animal into another. Still,
with reference to this last idea, it is plain that revelation gives us
no definition of species as distinguished from varieties or races, so
that there is nothing to prevent the supposition that, within certain
limits indicated by the expression "after its kind," animals or plants
may have been so constituted as to vary greatly in the progress of
geological time.

If we ask whether any thing is known to science which can give even a
decided probability to the notion that living beings are parts of an
undirected evolution proceeding under merely dead insentient forces,
and without intention, the answer must be emphatically no.

I have elsewhere fully discussed these questions, and may here make
some general statements as to certain scientific facts which at
present bar the way against the hypothesis of evolution as applied to
life, and especially against that form of it to which Darwin and his
disciples have given so great prominence.

1. The albuminous or protoplasmic material, which seems to be
necessary to the existence of every living being, is known to us as a
product only of the action of previously living protoplasm. Though it
is often stated that the production of albumen from its elements is a
process not differing from the formation of water or any other
inorganic material from its elements, this statement is false in fact,
since, though many so-called organic substances have been produced by
chemical processes, no particle of either living or non-living
organizable matter of the nature of protoplasm has ever been so
produced. The origin, therefore, of this albuminous matter is as much
a mystery to us at present as that of any of the chemical elements.

2. Though some animals and plants are very simple in their visible
structure, they all present vital properties not to be found in dead
albuminous matter, and no m