OKIGIN OF THE ANIMATED TRIBES. H7 



organization, and one by a special interference, or an interrup- 

 tion of the natural order of events, must be admitted. 



Leaving for a future opportunity of comment the grand 

 fallacy involved in this argument, as regards the conclusion in 

 favour of a miraculous origin of life this being an assumption 

 of a fact equally contrary to experience let us confine our- 

 selves for the present to a few sentences of remark on the 

 minor one of assuming as a necessity on our side that life 

 should be shown as still capable of originating in the inorganic 

 elements. There is certainly no express reason to suppose that, 

 although life had been imparted by natural means after the 

 first cooling of the surface to a suitable temperature, it would 

 have continued thereafter to be capable of being imparted in 

 like manner. The great work of the peopling of this ^ globe 

 with living species is mainly a fact accomplished ; the highest 

 known species came as a crowning effect thousands of years 

 ago. The work being thus, to all appearance, finished, we are 

 not necessarily to expect that the origination of life and of species 

 should be conspicuously exemplified in the present day. We are 

 rather to expect that the vital phenomena presented to our 

 eye should mainly, if not entirely, be limited to a regular and 

 unvarying succession of races by the ordinary means of gene- 

 ration. This, however, is no more an argument against a time 

 when phenomena of the first kind prevailed, than it would be 

 a proof against the fact of a mature man having once been a 

 growing youth, that he is now seen growing no longer. We 

 might consider the primitive production of species either as 

 one phenomenon, of the nature of the development of an indi- 

 vidual embryo, and that phenomenon as past, just as the 

 individual creation is perfected at birth, or as expressly and 

 wholly a consequence of conditions, which being temporary, the 

 results were temporary also. From the occupation of all the 

 great geographical provinces with a more or less full suite of 

 the forms of life, a new development may have hardly any 

 chance of being now drawn forth, and none of being advanced 

 to any extent, even though the same life-creating laws be stil 

 in force. Or the operations of these laws might be observant 

 of times, and those of rare occurrence, so that hundreds of 

 human generations may pass without an opportunity of wit- 

 nessing such effects. However, then, it may actually have 

 been, assuredly the most rigid disproof of primitive creation as 

 a fact of our time could be no conclusive argument against a 

 natural creation at a time when the earth was vacant of all 

 organic tenantry. 



