_ All animals are divided into vertebrates and
invertebrates, the animals with a backbone and animals without. Between
these two groups the barrier of backbone stands impassable till it is
explained how a butterfly could become a bird, or a snail a serpent, or
a star fish acquire the skeleton of the shark. These two groups, the
vertebrate animals and the invertebrate, must be regarded as
fundamentally distinct.

3. _Whence the breast?_ Vertebrates are either mammals or submammals.
The breastless tribes are brids, [tr. note: sic] reptiles, and fishes.
These are far beneath in the scale, while the mammal, by its peculiar
endowment in that it gives suck to its young, stands elect, aloft, and
apart. Till it is shown how an animal that never got milk from its
mother stumbled on the capacity of giving what was never given it, _the
breast_ will stand, against all dreams of development, companion-barrier
to the backbone. Nor is there an animal that can be regarded as a
connecting link between these two master groups.

The "theistic" evolutionist, who believes that God at various times
"helped out" the forces residing in matter, by creating something new,
is inclined to say that at each of these points,--the origin of the
first sentient animal, the origin of the first vertebrate, and of the
first mammal,--God by his omnipotence caused a new type to originate.
Aside from the fact that "forces resident in matter," the basic idea of
the evolutionistic theory, here begins to become somewhat faint as a
background even for a "theistic" conception of development, it is
evident that we have already reached a point far down the scale of
organic evolution in which the admission must be made that no possible
working of forces within matter can account for the change. Again we
say, if we already admit that the various great types of animal life
could not originate without a special creative act of God, then why
should we not accept the record of Genesis which says that the various
species of plants and the various species of animals were created, each
a separate species, in the beginning? Once admit special creative acts,
and there is no longer any need for a hypothesis of evolution.

Man.

The difficulty which stands in the way of accepting, on purely
scientific grounds, the descent of man from a brute ancestor, is, first
of all a biological (physiological) difficulty. Among all the mammalia
(to accept the classification of man with th