102 EVOLUTION THE RESULT OF CHEMICAL FORCES. 



necessity of accounting for the existence in the southern temper- 

 ate zone of life-forms which could never have crossed the 

 equator, it is rendered almost certain that the antarctic zone was 

 once a center of origin and distribution of animals and plants as 

 well as the arctic. Now if this was so, the two sources of life 

 must have been, in the nature of the case, entirely independent. 

 Yet they have evolved identical orders, families, and genera, and 

 in some cases even species. Almost the only difference in the 

 two hemispheres is that the southern provinces have not advanced 

 in their indigenous productions to the same grade of develop- 

 ment as the northern. Australia for instance represents almost 

 accurately the life-conditions of Europe in the earliest Tertiary 

 times, South America the later Tertiary, and South Africa the 

 Quarternary. Now who will estimate the probability on the 

 doctrine of chances of these hundreds of thousands of similar 

 and often identical life-forms springing by fortuitous variation 

 from two independent sources of origin? The chances against 

 it are beyond the limits of figures. 



All evolutionists have seen that independent centers of evolu- 

 tion would be fatal to their theories. Consequently they have 

 exhausted their ingenuity in endeavoring to explain the anomalies 

 of organic distribution. They have raised up sea bottoms to 

 connect continents, have created imaginary islands for migratory 

 halting places, and have stretched the great glacial bridges across 

 the equator. They have been seemingly so afraid they would be 

 obliged to acknowledge a supernatural Creator, that they have 

 laid out miraculous sea-voyages for animals and plants, have sent 

 them against winds and ocean-currents from north zones to 

 south zones, they have loaded the whirlwinds with vegetable 

 seeds and the feet of birds with living embryos. But notwith- 

 standing the formidable array of the literature on this subject, I 

 must think that if there is not an innate tendency to progressive 

 development in living organisms, something that compels an on- 

 ward movement along the entire front of the line, we might as 

 well skip Darwin, Haeckel, and Spencer, and go back to Paley's 

 " Natural Theology ;" for this is the latest book that has given 

 even an intelligible explanation of how animals and plants came 

 to be what they are and where they are. 



