the new one
began. But surely it is no approach to a reason against the existence of a
thing that we cannot determine the exact moment of its first manifestation.
When watching "dissolving views," who can tell, whilst closely observing
the gradual changes, exactly at what moment a new picture, say St. Mark's,
Venice, can be said to have commenced its manifestation, or have begun to
dominate a preceding representation of "Dotheboys' Hall"? That, however, is
no reason for denying the complete difference between the two pictures and
the ideas they respectively embody.

The notion of a special nature, a peculiar innate power and activity--what
the scholastics called a "substantial form"--will be distasteful to many.
The objection to the notion seems, however, to be a futile one, for it is
absolutely impossible to altogether avoid such a conception and such an
assumption. If we refuse it to the individuals which embody the species, we
must admit it as regards their component parts--nay, even if we accept the
hypothesis of pangenesis, we are nevertheless compelled to attribute to
each gemmule that peculiar power of reproducing its own nature (its own
"substantial form"), with its special activity, and that remarkable {273}
power of annexing itself to certain other well-defined gemmules whose
nature it is also to plant themselves in a certain definite vicinity. So
that in each individual, instead of one such peculiar power and activity
dominating and controlling all the parts, you have an infinity of separate
powers and activities limited to the several minute component gemmules.

It is possible that in some minds, the notion may lurk that such powers are
simpler and easier to understand, because the bodies they affect are so
minute! This absurdity hardly bears stating. We can easily conceive a being
so small, that a gemmule would be to it as large as St. Paul's would be to
us.

Admitting then the existence of species, and of their successive evolution,
is there anything in these ideas hostile to Christian belief?

Writers such as Vogt and Buchner will of course contend that there is; but
naturalists, generally, assume that God acts in and by the various laws of
nature. And this is equivalent to admitting the doctrine of "derivative
creation." With very few exceptions, none deny such Divine concurrence.
Even "design" and "purpose" are recognized as quite compatible with
evolution, and even with the special "nebular" and Da