the higher orders, seems to
have escaped our author's notice; at least two individuals, a male and a
female, must have been evolved out of the next lower race, before the
new species could continue its kind. Apply these considerations to the
creation of man, who, according to our author's Scripture, was born of a
monkey. To suppose, that, at the first trial, an Adam and an Eve were
born near each other, so that they might have a chance of meeting in the
course of their lives, would look too much like the operation of
intelligence and design. On the theory of an organic creation by law, as
the monkey race is spread over large regions of the globe, we must
suppose that many of each sex were produced, and died childless, before
any Adam was happy enough to find an Eve. Then, at no very distant
period, within a few thousand years, the birth of a man from an animal
of a lower type was no very strange event. Probably it occurred so
often, that the monkeys themselves ceased to be astonished at it. And
yet, this tribe of animals, with all the benefit of large experience,
with increased numbers, and with all the requisite conditions fulfilled
at least as perfectly as they were at the earlier period of their
history, have not succeeded, in the three or four thousand years during
which they have been subject to the observation of intelligent beings,
in producing even a decent semblance of a man.

With the exposure of this crowning absurdity, we must close our direct
examination of this "History of Creation." We have not room to consider
some of the appendages to the theory, such as the assertion of the
essential unity of the human and the brute intellect, the denial of the
immaterial nature of mind, and the advocacy of the system of phrenology.
These absurd and degrading doctrines are naturally connected with the
atheistic hypothesis we have been considering. They are its legitimate
children. But they have already been refuted so often and so
conclusively, that any revival of them at the present day is hardly
deserving of notice. If we should stop here, then, it may fairly be left
to the judgment of our readers, whether we have not fulfilled the pledge
given at the outset, by showing that this theory is faulty at every
point, even when viewed from the author's own ground. The proposal of it
is no new thing. In one or another form, varying in particulars, but
agreeing in substance, it has been before the world ever since the days