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 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 modifi- 



