PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. lix 



true ; but if I, Dr. Hitchcock, can trace a bad moral effect from it, it 

 must be condemned. So simple or so blinded is this writer, that, 

 even in a work designed to reconcile science and religion, he betrays 

 that it will be necessary to reject a philosophical truth a thing un- 

 mistakeably a revelation of God it it does not square with some 

 already received dogma. It is much to be feared that those votaries 

 who do not think of science at all, will be apt to cry, Non tali 

 auxilio, non defensoribus istis. 



The learned President at length leaves the general question, and 

 asserts that the hypothesis of creation in the manner of law ' is not 

 sustained by facts." If this were the case, it were a great pity for 

 Dr. Hitchcock to have exposed himself to logical shipwreck on the 

 general question. But is it so ? If the reader of the present 

 volume and its Proofs and Illustrations will carefully peruse Dr. 

 Hitchcock's exposition of adverse facts, he will see its weakness at 

 once. We have a few feeble remarks against the nebular hypothesis, 

 which this learned person considers as only resting on unresolved 

 nebular matter in the heavens, altogether forgetting Laplace's 

 mathematical demonstrations, ignorant even of the recent addition 

 made to its support by his own countryman Kirkwood. Then equi- 

 vocal generation is treated. There is no satisfactory proof of an 

 organic being ever springing from inorganic elements. Thus the 

 " strongest argument" of the advocates of the law hypothesis is put 

 an end to. Now, it is not the strongest argument at all, but on the 

 contrary, one always regarded in the Vestiges as of inferior conse- 

 quence. Dr. Hitchcock argues that no blind impulse, nothing but 

 an intelligent cause, could impart life and intellect as if ^ anything 

 but an intelligent cause were imagined in the proposition that 

 natural processes were concerned in the origin of life ! He then 

 proceeds to contend against the inferences from embiyology. 

 enough for him, on this point, to be assured that a human embryo 

 will not stop short at an insect, a fish, or a reptile, but is as certain 

 to become a man as the sun is to rise and set. Truly he is easily 

 satisfied on the subject ! Dr. Hitchcock does not see that the ques- 

 tion is not at all, Will the embryo of any high animal stop at an in- 

 ferior point ? but, Have the embryos of low animals in past times 

 gone on, under a higher gestative law, to superior forms ? While 

 analogy does nothing for the first question, beyond the rare and 

 abnormal stoppings of particular organs at lower points of develop- 

 ment, and the recession of sex in insects, it manifestly stands in the 

 highest consistency to the second question, for advance is the rule of 

 embryotic development. The geologic arguings of the learned Pre- 

 sident are only a weak dilution of those of Messrs. Sedgwick and 

 Miller, as, that the highest cephalopoda and fishes came first, that 

 there has been a degradation of forms, and so forth, all of them 

 dogmas which have' already been fully refuted, not on any reasonings 

 of 'ours, but on the authority of the highest naturalists that can be 

 brought into court. 



Dr. Hitchcock comes finally to a different class of arguments 



