ve done this latter unless every minutest shade of
difference between offspring and parent be regarded as the effect of a
separate creative act. Unless creation have originated every one of
those divergencies the accumulation of which constitutes a species,
clearly it cannot have originated that species. With some of the
phenomena connected with species the theory of creation cannot be
reconciled unless this novel interpretation be placed upon the word
creation, whereas there are none of the phenomena with which the
evolutionary hypothesis conflicts, and few, if any, which, when
restricted to its proper office of auxiliary, it will not help to
explain.

To what we might thus be assured of, even if we had only general
principles to guide us, all obtainable evidence unanimously testifies.
Geology distinctly proclaims that every portion of our globe's surface
has undergone vast changes, and that its organic inhabitants have
changed simultaneously and proportionately. The proof absolute, which it
furnishes, that at a period when few, if any, existing species had made
their appearance, many species now extinct already existed, is proof
equally absolute that if all species extinct and extant were created,
they cannot, at any rate, have been created at the same time. Of so much
at least we must be satisfied, unless we are prepared to accept the
ingenious conjecture of an orthodox divine, that, while our earth was
being formed out of chaos, Satan, to confound the faith of remote
generations, brought over bones of monsters from other worlds and
embedded them in the soil of ours, or that, as the same idea has been
otherwise expressed, while the earth's crust was a baking the devil had
a finger in the pie. Moreover, on the supposition that there was a break
of ages between the creations of extinct and of extant species, as
geology positively declares there must have been if both were separately
created, how passing strange is the 'grand fact that all extinct beings
can be classed with all recent beings'! The strangeness disappears,
however, when both are regarded as descendants of common progenitors.
The wonder would then be if they could not be so classed. Again, how
astonishing on the creative, how natural on the evolutionary hypothesis,
that the arrangement of bones in the hand of a man, the wing of a bat,
the fin of a porpoise, the leg of a horse, should be precisely the same;
the number of vertebrae in the neck of a giraffe,