EVOLUTION AND MIND. 361 



stages of development in which there are certain likenesses, never very- 

 close, to certain forms of animal life lower down than itself in the 

 scale of being likenesses which simply bear witness to the unity of 

 plan in all forms of animal life. 



I also find it difficult to twist the marvellous unprovability of man 

 into an argument for the doctrine of evolution. Who shall say that 

 this improvability is not restricted within certain prescribed limits? 

 As yet man, in his struggle for life, has never turned his opportunities 

 for natural selection so far to account as to make even the slightest 

 advance toward physical improvement. And it is possible that the 

 change for the better which is actually witnessed in man may have to 

 be explained in accordance with the Scriptures rather than in accord- 

 ance with the doctrine of evolution. 



Nor can I rest satisfied with what may be spoken of as the more 

 special evidence in favor of evolution. The pigeon, by developing 

 under cultivation into what may be considered as improved varieties 

 of pigeon, may at first seem to be the subject of evolution ; but the 

 changes produced in this way are never more than those minor changes 

 which go to make up the differences called varieties, never so great as 

 to constitute another species of bird. Moreover, only let the varieties 

 thus produced be let alone for a few generations, and the inevitable 

 result is a return to the original form of the common pigeon, if not to 

 that of the wild, blue rock-pigeon. The history contradicts the notion 

 of evolution rather than confirms it. And so with the dog or any 

 other animal which may be modified as the pigeon is modified ; the 

 change produced is never beyond that of mere variety, never into 

 that of a new species; and let the constraining influences which 

 brought it about come to an end, and, as with the pigeon, it is 

 not long before the original wild form has again cropped out. 

 And what other conclusion can be fairly drawn from the infer- 

 tility of mules than this that there is a barrier between different 

 species of animals, even between those which are most closely akin 

 to each other, by which one is prevented from passing into the 

 other. Nay, it is even difficult to find any evidence in favor of evolu- 

 tion in the history of the rudimentary creatures which swarm in dense 

 crowds around the very feet of the scale of being. Here are wonder- 

 ful changes at work by which, as Dr. Bastian so clearly demonstrates, 

 bacteria, the simplest of all living units, may be developed, possibly 

 from inorganic elements, almost at the will of the experimenter, into 

 monads, and amoebae, and paramecia, or into the lowest forms of 

 fungus into forms of animal life, that is to say, or into forms of 

 vegetable life ; but not much is to be built upon this fact in favor of 

 evolution. For what follows ? Simply this that these forms are un- 

 stable in the highest degree, and that, instead of passing on into higher 

 forms of being, they presently again break up into their original bac- 

 terial units, which units are destined again and again to go through 



