1 62 THE FIRST VERTEBRATE, 



Herbert Spencer. They will there see by what extra- 

 ordinarily simple gradations the lowliest organisms are 

 connected with higher and the highest forms. They 

 will there find that ' modification of characters' is a 

 doctrine less intricate than might be supposed, even if 

 it cannot be wholly explained in words of one syllable. 



If any intelligent persons can discern the undulatory 

 theory of light and the modern system of botany in the 

 first chapter of Genesis, no one would wish to complain 

 of their ingenuity, unless they proposed to support a 

 particular theory of inspiration by these discoveries. 

 But then, if the theories of science are only c the un- 

 dulations of human opinion, 1 it becomes necessary to 

 ask why the botanical undulation of the present day 

 is accepted as a witness, and the Darwinian undulation 

 rejected. Had the famous Pagan critic, to whom your 

 correspondent ' R. T. E.' refers, imagined the sentence, 

 ' Let there be light, and there was light,' to be a 

 scientific description instead of a theological one, we 

 may feel sure that he would have condemned it for 

 bombast instead of praising it for its majesty of ex- 

 pression. As it is, he does not declare it to be the 

 sublimest sentence ever uttered, but remarks that 

 'the lawgiver of the Jews, no common man, having 

 comprehended the power of the divinity according 

 to the just conception of it, unfolded it agreeably 

 thereto,' both in this and in the parallel phrase, { Let 

 the dry land appear, and it was so/ That all things 

 which are and which become, both are what they are 

 and become what they become by the simple fiat of the 



