34 SPECIES NOT 



Why talk of our god-like reason and the per- 

 fection of our senses, and their adaptation to 

 the world around us? Mr. Darwin will tell you 

 they are but degrees in animal development, 

 they are the results of his law of variation, 

 of his struggle for existence and natural selec- 

 tion, marks only of progress in the great law 

 of change which he says has existed in the 

 physical world for a period too great for the 

 mind to grasp, and from which he assumes that 

 "no cataclysm has desolated the whole world, 

 and that we may look with some confidence to 

 a secure future of equally inappreciable length," 

 in which, "judging from the past we may infer 

 safely that not one living species will transmit 

 its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity." 

 (Page 489.) 



Now if the last passage is true, Mr. Darwin's 

 law must be a constant and universal one, which 

 we have just seen is a profoundly absurd sup- 

 position, and distinctly over and over again 

 denied by Mr. Darwin. How strange, if there 

 is a vestige of truth in this remarkable theory, 

 that we should never either in past or present 

 time have seen a transitional species. Immense 

 time is one of the pillars of Mr. Darwin's doctrine. 

 Variation also being gradual, the changes must 

 occur in successive periods, and it passes all 

 belief that neither during the historic period, or 

 lapse of time since the Silurian epoch, the verv 

 thought of which takes away one's breath, no 

 single solitary instance of the transmutation of 



