234 RAMBLES AND REVERIES. 



of the words used to denote Creation means to 

 produce from nothing, while the other implies to 

 modify what was already in existence. If that 

 be so, it is no more than is required by a rational 

 evolutionist, for he must admit that matter and life 

 were new creations so far as our earth is concerned. 

 We are justified in concluding, therefore, that 

 Creation, as described by the writer of Genesis, 

 means a process or method, or a law, which may 

 as well be called evolution as anything else. 



There is, we need hardly say, an extreme school 

 of evolutionists who would demur to our putting of 

 the case. But nothing is easier than to show how 

 they refute themselves. Haeckel, for example, de- 

 clares that if the primordial cells did not originate 

 spontaneously, they must have been produced super- 

 naturally, an alternative we readily accept, seeing 

 that Haeckel has recently given up the theory of 

 spontaneous generation. Huxley, again, in his 

 article on Biology in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 

 says : " If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living 

 matter must have arisen from not living matter : 

 for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe 

 was at one time such, that living matter could 

 not have existed in it, life being entirely incom- 

 patible with the gaseous state." And yet in the 

 same article he declares that " at the present 

 moment there is not a shadow of trustworthy direct 

 evidence that abiogenesis (i.e., spontaneous genera- 

 tion) does take place, or has taken place, within 

 the period during which the existence of the globe 

 is recorded." 



