y and beauty of the results; and, in the
ultimate forthcoming of a being susceptible of appreciating such beauty,
evidence of the preordaining of such relation of power to the
appreciation. Natural selection acknowledges that if power or beauty, in
itself, should be a purpose in creation, it would be absolutely fatal to
it as a hypothesis.

Natural selection sees grandeur in the "view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms
or into one." Derivation sees, therein, a narrow invocation of a special
miracle and an unworthy limitation of creative power, the grandeur of
which is manifested daily, hourly, in calling into life many forms, by
conversion of physical and chemical into vital modes of force, under as
many diversified conditions of the requisite elements to be so combined.

Natural selection leaves the subsequent origin and succession of species
to the fortuitous concurrence of outward conditions; derivation
recognises a purpose in the defined and preordained course, due to
innate capacity or power of change, by which homogeneously-created
protozoa have risen to the higher forms of plants and animals.

The hypothesis of derivation rests upon conclusions from four great
series of inductively established facts, together with a probable result
of facts of a fifth class; the hypothesis of natural selection totters
on the extension of a conjectural condition explanatory of extinction to
the origination of species, inapplicable in that extension to the
majority of organisms, and not known or observed to apply to the origin
of any species.

_IV.--Epigenesis or Evolution?_

The derivative origin of species, then, being at present the most
admissible one, and the retrospective survey of such species showing
convergence, as time recedes, to more simplified or generalised
organisations, the result to which the suggested train of thought
inevitably leads is very analogous in each instance. If to kosmos or the
mundane system have been allotted powers equivalent to the development
of the several grades of life, may not the demonstrated series of
conversions of force have also included that into the vital form?

In the last century, physiologists were divided as to the principle
guiding the work of organic development.

The "evolutionists" contended that the new being preexisted in a
complete state of formation, needing only to be vivified by impregnation
in order