384 LOUIS AGASSIZ. 



detest them, because I think them untrue. 

 They shut out all argument from design and 

 all notion of a Creative Providence, and in so 

 doing they appear to me to deprive physiology 

 of its life and strength, and language of its 

 beauty and meaning. I am as much offended 

 in taste by the turgid mystical bombast of 

 Geoffroy as I am disgusted by his cold and 

 irrational materiaHsm. When men of his 

 school talk of the elective af&nity of organic 

 types, I hear a jargon I cannot comprehend, 

 and I turn from it in disgust ; and when they 

 talk of spontaneous generation and transmuta- 

 tion of species, they seem to me to try nature 

 by an hypothesis, and not to try their hypoth- 

 esis by nature. Where are their facts on 

 which to form an inductive truth ? I deny 

 their starting condition. " Oh ! but " they re- 

 ply, " we have progressive development in ge- 

 ology." Now, I allow (as all geologists must 

 do) a kind of progressive development For 

 example, the first fish are below the reptiles ; 

 and the first reptiles older than man. I say, 

 we have successive forms of animal life 

 adapted to successive conditions (so far, prov- 

 ing design), and not derived in natural suc- 

 cession in the ordinary way of generation. 

 But if no single fact in actual nature allows 



