FROM MAN TO ZOOPHYTE. 309 



been, and ever will be impossible. They fear, and have 

 excellent grounds for their fear, that if vital power was 

 admitted, the first bestowal of that vital power upon non- 

 living matter would be regarded as a miracle, and that the 

 admission of this one miracle might lead to the supposition 

 that others had been wrought, and thus pave the way to a 

 belief in a Power capable perhaps of performing not only 

 that, but miracles of another kind equally impossible to 

 science, and inadmissible according to law. Some people 

 display powerless anger and are not a little alarmed lest a 

 small portion of intelligent mankind, following the vicious 

 example set by the most childisn -of their predecessors, 

 should be so deluded as to fancy that there was any real 

 interest in studying the absurd myths and legends upon 

 which the so-called history of the past two or three thou- 

 sand years can alone be said to rest. They are convinced 

 that the whole power of the united intellect of civilized man 

 should be constantly occupied in the study of that historical 

 period which can alone be really interesting and useful to 

 our generation, viz., that period of history which alone is 

 firmly constructed upon the lasting and infallible records of 

 form and structure which may be followed, link by link, from 

 the remains of our arboreal ancestors up to those of the 

 primordial living jelly, and from this to the inorganic matter 

 of our earth. 



Nevertheless I must, once more, repeat that I am un- 

 able to come to any other conclusion than this, viz., that the 

 facts of the case, compel the mind open to conviction, and 

 not yet committed to the doctrine of the universal applica- 

 tion of physical causation, to admit the existence of some 

 active guiding governing power which, somehow, influences 

 the matter of the bioplasm, and in such a way that its mole- 



