Darwinism Verified. 21 



or else retreated upon the assumption that leop- 

 ards and lions were separately created. In either 

 case science was equally at fault ; for, as above 

 argued, the hypothesis of special creations, as re- 

 ferring a particular group of phenomena to that 

 Divine action which is the equal source of all phe- 

 nomena, is not entitled to be considered a scien- 

 tific explanation. But when Mr. Darwin called 

 attention to the working of natural selection, the 

 difficulty t was removed, and it at once became 

 highly probable that such allied forms had di- 

 verged from a common stock through the accumu- 

 lation of minute modifications. 



Such being the conclusion to which we are led 

 by considering the process of natural selection, it 

 becomes desirable to inquire whether the conclu- 

 sion is confirmed by the most general phenomena 

 of organic life that have been observed and tab- 

 ulated. There is no hesitation or ambiguity in 

 the answer. Whether we consider the classifi- 

 catory relationships of plants and animals, their 

 embryology, their morphology, their geographical 

 distribution, or their geological succession, there 

 is not only abundance of evidence, but the evi- 

 dence points wholly in one direction. With en- 

 tire unanimity the phenomena in question testify 

 that species have arisen by descent with niodifi- 



