pecies and what by a mere varietal
form, and also on what we understand by creation and what we mean by
development. Twenty years ago nearly all geologists were believers in
creation, though it must be admitted without precisely understanding
what they meant by the term. Now, the great impression produced by
Darwin's speculations and the prevalence of the evolutionist
philosophy have produced a leaning in the other direction. More
recently, however, the absurdities into which the extreme
evolutionists find themselves driven have produced a reaction; and we
hope that views consistent with revelation, or at least with Theism,
will again be in the ascendant, and that present controversies will
serve to give more precise and definite views than heretofore of the
relation of nature to God. As illustrations of the opinions prevalent
before the rise of the development theory, I may quote from Pictet and
Bronn, two of the most eminent palaeontologists.

Pictet says, in the introduction to his "Traite de Paleontologie:" "It
seems to me impossible that we should admit, as an explanation of the
phenomena of successive faunas, the passage of species into one
another; the limits of such transitions of species, even supposing
that the lapse of a vast period of time may have given them a
character of reality much greater than that which the study of
existing nature leads us to suppose, are still infinitely within those
differences which distinguish two successive faunas. Lastly, we can
least of all account by this theory for the appearance of new _types_,
to explain the introduction of which we must necessarily, in the
present state of science, recur to the idea of distinct creations
posterior to the first."

The following are the general conclusions of Bronn, in his elaborate
and most valuable essay, presented to the French Academy in 1856, as
summarized in a notice of the work in the Journal of the Geological
Society:

"1. The first productions of this power in the oldest Neptunian strata
of the earth consisted of Plants, Zoophytes, Mollusks, Crustaceans,
and perhaps even Fish; the simultaneous appearance of which,
therefore, contradicts the assumption that the more perfect organic
forms arose out of the gradual transformation in time of the more
imperfect forms.

"2. The same power which produced the first organic forms has
continued to operate in intensively as well as extensively increasing
activity during the whole subsequ