aves in it by their own proper
movement," [61]--an explanation which loses some of its helpfulness when
we remember that the ethereal ocean is only a mathematical entity. "A
cubic centimetre contains 21,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules,"
"the number of impacts received by each molecule of air during one
second will be 4,700 millions. The distance traversed between each
impact averages 95/1000000 of a millimetre," and so on with lines of
ciphers to overawe the gaping millions with Mr. Laing's minute certainty
as to the ultimate constitution of matter. [62]

As to _how_ atoms came into existence, he can only reply, "Behind the
veil, behind the veil;" for it is at this point at last that he becomes
agnostic.[63] The notion of creation is rejected (after Spencer) as
inconceivable, because unimaginable, as though the origination of every
change in the phenomenal world were not just as unimaginable; we see
movement _in process_, and we see its results, but its inception is
unimaginable, and its efficient cause still more so.

The evolution of man is practically taken for granted, the only question
being the _when_.

We have the old argument from embryonic transformism brought forward
without any hint that later investigation tends to show differentiation
further and further back, prior to segmentation and, according to some,
in the very protoplasm itself. Nothing could be more inaccurate than to
say "every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile
before arriving at that of a mammal and finally of man." [64] All that
can be truly said is that the embryonic man is at certain stages not
superficially distinguishable from the embryonic fish--quite a different
thing, and no more significant than that the adult man possesses organs
and functions in common with other species of the animal genus.

Mr. Laing's own conclusions from skulls and human remains which he takes
to be those of tertiary man, show man to be as obstinately unlike the
"dryopithecus" as ever, in fact, the reputedly oldest skulls [65] are a
decided improvement on the Carnstadt and Neanderthal type. Even then man
seems to have been the same flint-chipping, tool-making, speaking animal
as now. So convinced is he of this essential and ineradicable difference
in his heart, that seeing traces of design in palaeolithic flint flakes,
and so forth, he has "not the remotest doubt as to their being the work
of human hands,"--"as impossible to doubt as