30 DARWINISM. 



and mammals by the likeness of the vertebrate skeleton ! 

 How strangely plants and animals by the phenomena 

 of generation, not only in the union of the sexes, but 

 also in (agamogenesis) or asexual reproduction ! Need 

 we wonder at community of origin between a coral and 

 a cactus, a whale and a sloth, a wolf and a Shylock, 

 when we find that a lady's silken tresses, the bristles 

 of a boar, the quill of the porcupine, the feathers of 

 the owl, and the horns of the buffalo, are parallel and 

 specifically interchangeable developments ? 



Consider the vine, with its stem, branches, twigs, 

 roots, rootlets, leaves, tendrils, and the luscious grapes 

 of the ripe cluster. From one seed sprang all of these. 

 On the bough of an orange tree there live and grow 

 together leaf and petiole, flower and fruit, the green 

 unripe fruit, the yellow and the golden-ripe. All these 

 from one seed. Yet there is no jealousy among them. 

 No one disowns a kindred origin for the root of the 

 tree and its golden fruit, utterly unlike as these are, 

 but, like so many other utterly unlike things in this 

 world, sprung from the same germ. 



To have produced and accumulated the vast diver- 

 gences that now exist, a lapse of time, indeed, must be 

 conceded, unmeasured and perhaps immeasurable; but 

 this lapse of time is precisely what geology, independ- 

 ently of Darwinism, has already demanded. As the 

 Scriptures speak of the earth as immoveable, because 

 so it is in reference to the senses of man, they speak 

 also of the everlasting mountains, and with them the 

 rocks are a type of the eternal : compared with the 



