cunistances and llu- victims of our environ- 

 ment. And the Fn-uch Revolution is proof 

 sufficient that those very principles of 

 Diderot and Lamarck ended in social 

 anarchy, when God was removed from the 

 world. The lecturer, however, reminded 

 hie hearers that these were not the views 

 of the highest scientists of any a^-c. 

 BufFon, the greatest of naturalists, Cuvier, 

 the greatest of geologists, Owen, Agassiz, 

 Lyell, Virchow, and Kelvin were the chief 

 scientists of the last hundred years, but 

 they entirely disbelieved the theory of 

 Evolution. And the modern Evolutionist, 

 such as M. Deperet or Dr. Wallace, had 

 recently changed their tune. They ad- 

 mitted that the evidence was against them 

 — that the gaps in the record could not be 

 surmounted :it present, that nature still 

 refused fertility to hybrids, and that the 

 old arguments from rudimentary organs 

 were abandoned. These last were exceptional 

 facts which proved regression quite as nuu-h 

 as advance, and wliich, if they had be- 

 longed to creatures in a state of transfor- 

 mation, would have upset the balance of 

 the organism. The lecturer illustrated 

 these remarks by the instances of the 

 whale's teeth and femur, and of the appa- 

 rent descent of the elephant from the 

 moeritherium, paleomastodon, tetrabelodon. 

 mastodon, and mammoth. He warned his 

 audience that (as Euffon had shown) 

 science was largely a system of abstrac- 

 tions. It often dealt in pure conjecture, 

 and at best could never penetrate to the 

 origin of anything. Sir Richard Owen 

 frankly admitted that the accident of a 

 working man showing him a buried tim- 

 ber once saved him from a huge geological 

 blunder. " We cannot," said Weismann, 

 the leading Darwinian of the day, ** ex- 

 plain even a single vital process by purely 

 physical forces." It was notorious that 

 Haeckel, in his works on Evolution, had 

 out of twenty-two stages of man's supposed 

 pedigree, invented twelve and leapt six, 

 besides faking (a serious charge) his il- 

 lustrations of embryos, in the desperate 

 hope of proving his theory. The origin of 

 life, the colouring of birds' feathers, tlie 

 nature of radium, the magnetism of the 

 pole, the electric organs of fish, the begin- 

 nings o*f si>eech, the extinction of the 

 whole fauna and flora of both worlds, and 

 the successive creations of new types of 

 animals and plants, are as great mysteries 

 as ever, on which science throws no real 

 light, and abnut which evolutionary science 

 is content onh' to fling phrases. Lord 

 Salisbury, when President of the British 

 Association at Oxford in 1894. justly de- 

 scribed Evolution as that "comfortable 

 word — one of those indefinite words from 

 time to tinie vouchsafed to humanity. 

 which b^s tlie gift of alleviating so many 

 perplexities, and masking so many gaps in 

 our knowledge. But the families of elemen- 

 tarv atoms do not breed. And we cannot. 



therefore, de^^cribc their ordered difference 

 to accidental variations perpetuated by 

 heredity under the influence of natural se- 

 lection." 



The lecturer then proceeded to show that 

 the first chapter of Genesis had anticipated 

 four thousand years of science, not only in 

 the order of events enumerated, but in the 

 general accuracy of the details. The world 

 was originally, according to a probable and 

 accepted conjecture of La Place, a whirl of 

 rotating gas, gradually condensing into 

 globular solidity, and throwing off from the 

 central heat rings, which became planets 

 like itself. This vapour state contained 

 the elements of metals, of sulphur and 

 lime, even of water, so largely composed 

 of gas (hydrogen), all of these emerged 

 on condensation (read Genesis 1, 1, 2). On 

 the first day or luminous period (for there 

 was as yet no sun to measure a strict day 

 period) the enormous discharge of electri- 

 city called forth luminous vibrations in the 

 ether; and the internal fire of the globe, 

 in contact with the water of ocean, gene- 

 rated a double citrrent which, travelling, 

 the one underground and the other by the 

 rising vapours of the sea, were neutralised 

 at the poles and produced an atmospheric 

 luminosity, exactly like the Aurora Bore- 

 alis (read Gen. 1, 3-5). On the second day, 

 the prime va 1 gra ni to rocks, on which no 

 life could be oi" has been found, first 

 emerged from the fiery sea, preparing the 

 floor of the future world. The earth was 

 literally, as St. Peter (2 Peter, iii., 5, 7) 

 describes it, not only "stored with fire," 

 but "standing in water and out of the 

 water." Now was the atmosphere (Hebrew 

 rakiyah, mistranslated firmament) pre- 

 pared; while the earth, a diminished but 

 solid ball, was poised in space (lead Gen. 

 1, 6-8). On the third day some 800 species 

 of carlK>nifcrous flora appeared — green 

 jjlants wliicli could grow without the sun, 

 and which, before long, disappeared bcneatli 

 the earth for perhaps 9,000.000 years, to 

 produce the coal beds of future ages. This 

 withdrew that excess of carbon in the air, 

 which, while it lasted, prevented the 

 appearance of animal life. (Rend Gen. i.. 

 9-13.) On the fourth day the sun appeared 

 as a light holder (Hebrew) through the 

 thick mist, shedding a powerful ray of 

 steady light, in which animals could be 

 warmed into life, as the ostrich and croco- 

 dlie eggs stili are, and in whii h also colour 

 could be called forth, as being de]>endent on 

 the action of light—hence the gay colouring 

 of the tropics as contrasted with Arctic 

 tints. (Read Gen. i.. 14-19.) On the fifth 

 day first appeared the only animals that 

 could have appeared, to swim in water or 

 fly above it : these were the primordial 

 molluscs, fi.^h (some without jaws and with 

 newt-like tails, others vertebrate and as 

 highly differentiated as at the present day): 

 the great saurians, or water lizards. 

 from forty to sixty feet long; and the first 



