210 CONTINUITY. 



term species are and have been rigidly limited, and have at 

 numerous periods been created complete and unchangeable, 

 or whether, in some mode or other, they have not gradually 

 and indefinitely varied, and whether the changes due to the 

 influence of surrounding circumstances, to efforts to accom- 

 modate themselves to surrounding changes, to what is called 

 natural selection, or to the necessity of yielding to superior 

 force in the struggle for existence, as maintained by our 

 illustrious countryman Darwin, and other causes, have not so 

 modified organisms as to enable them to exist under changed 

 conditions. I am not going to put forward any theory of my 

 own, I am not going to argue in support of any special 

 theory, but having endeavoured to show how, as science ad- 

 vances, the continuity of natural phenomena becomes more 

 apparent, it would be cowardice not to present some of the 

 main arguments for and against continuity as applied to the 

 history of organic beings. 



As we detect no such phenomenon as the creation or 

 spontaneous generation of vegetables and animals which are 

 large enough for the eye to see without instrumental assist- 

 ance, as we have long ceased to expect to find a Plesiosaurus 

 spontaneously generated in our fish-pond, or a Pterodactyle in 

 our pheasant-cover, the field of this class of research has be- 

 come identified with the field of the microscope, and at each 

 new phase the investigation has passed from a larger to a 

 smaller class of organisms. The question whether among the 

 smallest and apparently the most elementary forms of organic 

 life the phenomenon of spontaneous generation obtains, has 

 recently formed the subject of careful experiment and ani- 

 mated discussion in France. If it could be found that organ- 

 isms of a complex character were generated without progenitors 

 out of amorphous matter, it might reasonably be argued that 

 a similar mode of creation might obtain in regard to larger 

 organisms. Although we see no such phenomenon as the for- 

 mation of an animal such as an elephant, or a tree such as an 

 oak, excepting from a parent which resembles it, yet if the 

 microscope revealed to us organisms, smaller but equally 

 complex, so formed without having been reproduced, it would 

 render it not improbable that such might have been the case 



