THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 95 
every extinct Dodo or Moa, a new species may be 
created, to keep up the equilibrium of the whole. 
This is but a surmise: but it may be wise, perhaps, 
just now, to confess boldly, even to insist on, its 
possibility, lest any should fancy, from our unwill- 
ingness to allow it, that there would be ought in it, if 
proved, contrary to sound religion. 
I am, I must honestly confess, more and more 
unable to perceive anything which an orthodox 
Christian may not hold, in those physical theories 
of “evolution,” which are gaining more and more 
the assent of our best zoologists and botanists. All 
that they ask us to believe is, that “species” and 
“families,” and indeed the whole of organic nature, 
have gone through, and may still be going through, 
some such development from a lowest germ, as we 
know that every living individual, from the lowest 
zoophyte to man himself, does actually go through. 
They apply to the whole of the living world, past, 
present, and future, the law which is undeniably at 
work on each individual of it. They may be wrong, 
or they may be right: but what is there in such a 
