n8 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 







are so extremely inconvenient to the dogmatic conception 

 of the permanence of species, natm^alists to a great extent 

 intentionally did not concern themselves about them, and 

 even celebrated naturalists have often expressed the opinion 

 that cultivated organisms, domesticated animals and garden 

 plants, are artificial productions of man, and that their 

 formation and transformation could not decide anything 

 about the nature of species and about the origin of the 

 forms of species that live in a natural state. 



This perverse view went so far that, for example, Andreas 

 Wagner, a zoologist of Munich, quite seriously made the 

 following ridiculous assertion: — ''Animals and plants in 

 their wild state have been called into being by the Creator 

 as distinctly different and unchangeable species ; but in the 

 case of domestic animals and cultivated plants this was not 

 necessary, because he formed them from the beginning for the 

 use of man. The Creator formed man out of a clod of earth, 

 breathed the living breath into his nostrils, and then created 

 for him the different useful domestic animals and garden 

 plants, among which he thought well to save himself the 

 trouble of distinguishing species." Unfortunately, Andreas 

 Wagner does not tell us whether the Tree of Knowledge 

 in Paradise was a " good " wild species, or, as a cultivated 

 plant, " no species " at all. As the Tree of Knowledge was 

 placed by the Creator in the centre of Paradise, we might 

 be inclined to believe that it was a highly favoured culti- 

 vated plant, and therefore no species at all. But since, on 

 the other hand, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was 

 forbidden to man, and since many men, as Wagner himself 

 clearly shows, have never eaten of the fruit, it was 

 evidently not created for the use of man, and therefore in 



