248 SPECIES NOT 



possess these earlier formations, (pre-silurian,) 

 stretching over vast extents perfectly unaltered, 



and exhibiting no signs of life If these forms 



of life had existed, they must have been found. 

 Even Mr. Darwin shrinks from the deadly gripe 

 of this argument." (Page 245.) 



On the sterility of hybrids. 



u But though this objection (the geological one) 

 is that which is rated highest by himself, there 

 is another which appears to us in some respects 

 stronger still, and to which we deem Mr. Dar- 

 win's answers equally insufficient we mean the 

 law of sterility affixed to hybridism. If it were 

 possible to proclaim more distinctly, by one pro- 

 vision than another, that the difference between 

 various species was a law of creation, and not, 

 as 4 the transmutationists maintain, an ever-varying 

 accident, it would surely be by the interposing 

 such a bar to change, as that which now exists 

 in the universal fruitlessness, which is the result 

 of all known mixtures of animals specially dis- 

 tinct How then does Mr. Darwin dispose of 



this apparently impassible barrier of nature against 

 the transmutation theory? 



He urges that it depends not upon any great 

 law of life, but mainly, first, on the early death 

 of the embryo, or, secondly, upon the imperfection 

 of the reproductive system in the male offspring. 

 How he conceives this to be an answer to the 

 difficulty, it is beyond our power to conceive. 

 We can hardly imagine any clearer way of stating 

 the mode in which a universal law, if it existed, 



