ed, and which admit of an easy and obvious application to
this _second_ form of the theory, we shall offer a few remarks bearing
directly on its distinctive peculiarities, and directed to the exposure
of its radical defects.

The theory rests on two very precarious foundations: the assumption of
_spontaneous generation_, on the one hand, and the assumption of a
_transmutation of species_ on the other. Each of these assumptions is
necessarily involved in any attempt to account for the origin of the
vegetable and animal races by natural law, without direct Divine
interposition. For if, after the first organism was brought into being,
the production of every subsequent type may be accounted for simply by a
transmutation of species, yet the production of the original organism
itself, or the first commencement of life in any form, must necessarily
be ascribed either to a creative act or to spontaneous generation. A new
product is supposed to have come into being, differing from any that
ever existed before it, in the possession of vital and reproductive
powers; and this product can only be ascribed, if Creation be denied, to
the spontaneous action of some element, such as Electricity, on mucus or
albumen. In this sense the doctrine of spontaneous generation seems to
be necessarily involved in the first step of the process of Development,
and is, indeed, indispensable, if any account is to be given of the
origin of vegetable and animal life; but in the subsequent steps of the
same process it is superseded by a supposed transmutation of species,
whereby a lower form of life is said to rise into a higher, and an
inferior passes into a more perfect organism.

But we have no experience either of spontaneous generation on the one
hand, or of a transmutation of species on the other. Observation has not
discovered, nor has history recorded, an authentic example of either. In
regard to the _first_, the author of "The Vestiges" anticipates this
objection, and attempts to answer it. The objection is, that "a
transition from the inorganic to the organic, such as we must suppose to
have taken place in the early geological ages, is no ordinary cognizable
fact of the present time upon earth; structure, form, life, _are never
seen_ to be imparted to the insensate elements; the production of the
humblest plant or animalcule, otherwise than as a repetition of some
parental form, is not one of the possibilities of science."[44] Such is
the ob