MAN, PHYSICALLY CONSIDERED. 453 



appear to have been produced before terrestrial, and 

 every living substance to have originated from a form of 

 nucleus exquisitely simple and minute, and to have been 

 perpetually developing and expanding its powers, and 

 progressively advancing towards perfection. Man him- 

 self must have been of the aquatic order on his first crea- 

 tion , at that time indeed imperceptible from his exility, 

 but in process of years or rather of ages, acquiring a visi- 

 ble or oyster like form, with little gills instead of lungs, 

 and like the oyster produced spontaneously, without dis- 

 tinction into sexes ; that as reproduction is always favor- 

 able to improvement, the aquatic or oyster mannikin, by 

 being progressively accustomed to seek its food on the 

 nascent shores or edges of the primeval ocean, must have 

 grown, after a revolution of countless generations, first 

 into an amphibious, and then into a terrestrial animal ; 

 and in like manner, from being without sex, first also 

 into an androgynous* form, and thence into distinct male 

 and female.' What a blessing it is to the world, that 

 some hungry man, did not in ages which are past, swal- 

 low for his dinner, Sir Isaac Newton's oyster parents ! 



Such are theories which have been advocated in con- 

 tradiction to the simple account of the sacred historian. 

 How puerile and ridiculous do they appear when con- 

 trasted with the beautiful simplicity of the Bible. It is 

 there stated that God created Adam and Eve, and from 

 them the whole human family has descended. And yet 

 will men for the sake of furnishing arguments against 

 the Bible, acknowledge the baboon for their brother and 

 the clotted oyster for their father. They call this phi- 

 losophy and science breaking away from the shackles 

 of superstition. 



Such speculations as these only deserve notice to 

 show into what wild vagaries the human mind may wan- 



larly to the study of physics, and wrote largely upon that subject. 

 He also wrote some verses of no inconsiderable elegance and beauty. 

 As a physician he acquired great celebrity, and all his philosophical 

 works show a mind strong and enriched with reading, but wild and 

 fanciful. He died suddenly at Derby, in 1802. 



* Androgynous. Uniting both sexes. 

 VOL. I. NO. XIX. 40* 



