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way, and he lias accordingly penned some arguments against it, which 

 I will quote in preference to stating my own ideas on the subject. 

 The arguments apply to plants equally as to animals. 



" It may now be inquired," he writes, — " In what way was the cre- 

 ation of animated beings effected? The ordinary notion may, I think, 

 be not unjustly described as this, that the Almighty author produced 

 the progenitors of all existing species by some sort of personal or im- 

 mediate exertion. But how does this notion comport with what we 

 have seen of the gradual advance of species, from the humblest to the 

 highest ? How can we suppose an immediate exertion of this crea- 

 tive power at one time to produce zoophytes, another time to add a 

 few marine moUusks, another to bring in one or two conchifers, again 

 to produce crustaceous fishes, again perfect fishes, and so on to the 

 end ? This would surely be to take a very mean view of the Creative 

 Power — to, in short, anthropomorphize it, or reduce it to some such 

 character as that borne by the ordinary proceedings of mankind." 

 " Some other idea must then be come to with regard to 

 the mode in which the Divine Author proceeded in the organic crea- 

 tion."— p. 1.53. 



There is small likelihood that the stone tablets of Geology will ever 

 yield an explanation of the " mode " by which the exchange of spe- 

 cies was brought about in past eras. In the absence of real know- 

 ledge we take up an hypothesis which best accords with the facts, 

 when we seek to explain past events by assuming, hypothetically, that 

 one species changed into or produced another. 



Secondly, we have to consider whether species are distinguished 

 from each other by definite and permanent characters, or whether 

 they vary to such a degree as may justify a doubt respecting the ex- 

 istence of impassable limits between them. For the present I must 

 write of " species " as commonly understood by botanists, without at- 

 tempting any rigorous definition of the term, which may hereafter be 

 found to represent only a fiction of the human mind. Philosophical 

 thinkers now regard the larger groupings of systematic Botany, orders 

 and genera, in the light of conventional unions only. But almost all 

 botanists believe species to be something real and permanent in Na- 

 ture. The prevailing belief apparently is, that individual plants of 

 the same species vary among themselves only within limits compara- 

 tively narrow ; that they can be distinguished from those of different 

 species by certain peculiarities of structure or form, which are techni- 

 cally called " characters ; " that these characters are constantly re- 



