ork,
_La vie des etres animes_ (p. 102), "All investigation and observation
make it clear that, while the variability of creatures in a state of
nature displays itself in very different degrees, yet, in its most
astonishing manifestations, it remains confined within a circle beyond
which it cannot pass."

It is interesting to observe how writers of the Darwinian school
attempt to explain the origin of articulate language as a gradual
development of animal sounds. "It does not," observes Darwin, "appear
altogether incredible that some unusually wise ape-like animal should
have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to
indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger. And
this would have been a first step in the formation of a language." But
what a tremendous step! An ape-like animal that "thought" of imitating
a beast must certainly have been "unusually wise." In bridging the
chasm which rational speech interposes between man and the brute
creation, the Darwinian is forced to assume that the whole essential
modification is included in the first step. Then he conceals the
assumption by parcelling out the accidental modification in a supposed
series of transitional stages. He endeavors to veil his inability to
explain the first step, as Chevalier Bunsen remarked, by the easy but
fruitless assumption of an infinite space of time, destined to explain
the gradual development of animals into men; as if millions of years
could supply the want of an agent necessary for the first movement, for
the first step in the line of progress. "How can speech, the expression
of thought, develop itself in a year or in millions of years, out of
unarticulated sounds which express feelings of pleasure, pain, and
appetite? The common-sense of mankind will always shrink from such
theories."

4. The hopes and fears of Darwinians have rightly been centered on the
history of organic development as outlined in the geological record. It
has been pointed out repeatedly by the foremost men of science that if
the theory of genetic descent with the accumulation of small variations
be the true account of the origin of species, a complete record of the
ancestry of any existing species would reveal no distinction of species
and genera. Between any two well-defined species, if one be derived
from the other, there must be countless transition forms. But
palaeontology fails to support the theory of evolution by minute
variat