A.GASSIZ ON CREATION. 63 



and vary witliin certain narrow limits ; never in essential 

 qualities, but only in unessential points. No new species 

 could ever proceed from the changes or varieties of a species. 

 Not one of all organic species, therefore, is ever derived from 

 another, but each individual species has been separately 

 created by God. Each individual species, as Agassiz 

 expresses it, is " an embodied creative thought " of God. 



In direct opposition to the fact established by palseonto- 

 logical experience, that the duration of the individual 

 organic species is most unequal, and that many species 

 continue unchanged through several successive periods of 

 the earth's history, while others only existed during a small 

 portion of such a period, Agassiz maintains that one and 

 the same species never occurs in two different periods, but 

 that each individual period is characterized by species of 

 animals and plants which are quite peculiar, and belong to 

 it exclusively. He further shares Cuvier's opinion that the 

 whole of these inhabitants were annihilated by the great 

 and universal revolutions of the earth's surface, which 

 divide two successive periods, and that after its destruction 

 a new and specifically different assemblage of organisms was 

 created. This new creation Agassiz supposes to have taken 

 place in this manner : viz., that at each creation all the 

 inhabitants of the earth, in their full average number of 

 individuals, and in the peculiar relations corresponding 

 to the economy of nature, were, as a whole, suddenly placed 

 upon the earth by the Creator. In saying this he puts 

 himself in opposition to one of the most firmly established 

 and most important laws of animal and vegetable geography 

 — namely, to the law that each species has a single original 

 locality of origin, or a so-called " centre of creation," from 



