e that any man could bring himself to place credence in
such a marvellous series of occurrences? Monophyletic or polyphyletic
evolution, whichever, if either, it may have been, presents no
difficulty on the creation hypothesis.

The Divine plan might have embraced either method. It is not merely
revelation but ordinary reason which shows us that the wonderful things
which we know, not to speak of the far more wonderful things at which we
can only guess, cannot possibly be explained on any other hypothesis
than that of a Free First Cause--a Creator.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 35: _The Theory of Evolution._ By William Berryman Scott.
New York: The Macmillan Co.]

VIII. CATHOLIC WRITERS AND SPONTANEOUS GENERATION

The names of great Catholic men of science, laymen like Pasteur and
Mueller, or ecclesiastics like Stensen and Mendel, are familiar to all
educated persons. But even educated persons, or at least a great
majority of them, are quite ignorant of the goodly band of workers in
science who were devout children of the Church. Nothing perhaps more
fully exemplifies this than the history of the controversy respecting
the subject whose name is set down as the title of this paper. For
centuries a controversy raged at intervals around the question of
spontaneous generation. Did living things originate, not merely in the
past but every day, from non-living matter? When we consider such things
as the once mysterious appearance of maggots in meat it is not wonderful
that in the days before the microscope the answer was in the
affirmative.

To-day the question may be considered almost closed. True, the negative
proposition cannot be proved, hence it is impossible to say that
spontaneous generation does not take place. However, the scientific
world is at one in the belief that so far all attempts to prove it have
failed utterly.

St. Thomas Aquinas had a celebrated and sometimes misunderstood
controversy with Avicenna, a very famous Arabian philosopher. It was a
philosophical, but not strictly scientific, controversy, for both
persons accepted or assumed the existence of spontaneous generation.
Avicenna claimed that it took place by the powers of Nature alone,
whilst St. Thomas adopted the attitude which we should adopt to-day,
were spontaneous generation shown to be a fact, namely, that if Nature
possessed this power, it was because the Creator had willed it so.

We come to close quarters with the question i