ON THE LATEST FORM OF THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 191 
by ordinary generation than by direct creation, is equivalent to saying (if the folly and 
irreverence of the expression may be pardoned), **that a horse should create a horse is 
conceivable; but that God should create a horse is inconceivable.” The beginning of 
all life is in a nucleated cell of microscopic size. The original formation of such a 
cell, and the subsequent enlargement or rather multiplication of it by the epigenesis of 
other similar cells, are distinct acts of creation properly so called, whether preceded or 
not by a generative union of the parents. That the generative act should be ordinarily 
followed by the vivification of such a cell, is a law of nature, which, like other natural . 
Jaws, does not explain the phenomena, nor throw any light upon them, but merely de- 
‘scribes and classifies them ; and if naturalists were once led to believe the union of two 
sexes to be a necessary or invariable antecedent of the vivification, the discovered fact 
of parthenogenesis has convinced them of their mistake. The first appearance, then, 
of this living cell, is an indubitable case of an organized individual at once “ flashed 
into being," not indeed “out of nothingness,” but “out of a mass of inorganic ele- 
ments drawn together in due proportion for that purpose"; and special or miraculous 
creation, which appears so incredible or inconceivable to the advocates of the Develop- 
ment Theory, is in fact constantly going on all around us. Whether we call it creation 
or ordinary generation, the process — the mode in which inorganic particles are sud- 
denly bound together into an organic living whole — is wholly inexplicable. Science 
throws down her microscope before the process in despair. But inexplicable as it is, 
we are not able to deny that it is a law of nature which is perpetually verified before 
us. We cannot tell how a blade of grass grows; but we do not therefore affirm that 
it does not grow. 7 die, | i 
No one who understands the case will assert, that either the. scale on which the phe- 
nomenon takes place, or the frequency of its repetition, or the length of time within 
which it is completed, is a radically distinguishing circumstance which prevents us from 
identifying ordinary reproduction with direct creation. Frequent repetition, indeed, 
wears out wonder; but it does not make the process one whit more explicable than 
if it occurred only once in a millennium. One microscopic germ may be slowly de- 
veloped into a giant pine, which may reckon its years by Sara ; and another may 
give birth to an insect that completes its whole cycle of being in a single penson, But 
science knows as little of the process in the one case as in the other, and justly classes 
them both under the same name of generative development. “If an animal or a vege- 
table,” says Dugald Stewart, “ were brought into being before our eyes in an instant of 
time, the event would not be in itself more wonderful than their slow growth to matu- 
VOL. VIII. 16 
