''THE VESTIGES OF CREATION:' 35 



though he critic'zed various errors of detail. But he was 

 not prepared to accept the main doctrine, for which he 

 regarded the evidence as altogether inadequate. And on 

 more abstract grounds, he somewhat hesitatingly sug- 

 gested that if it were admitted as possible that any com- 

 bination of inorganic matter could under any circumstances 

 produce a living being, there was no reason why such a 

 combination should not be the real origin of every race, 

 including man himself Every species would thus have 

 been called into being in accordance with the original plan 

 and the pervading energy of the Creator, just when that 

 coincidence of circumstances occurred which was favour- 

 able to its development and continuance. It was cha- 

 racteristic of his state of imperfect emancipation from the 

 traditional view of Biblical revelation in which he had 

 been trained, that he added — 



That the Creator formed man out of the dust of the earth, 

 we have Scriptural authority for believing ; and we must con- 

 fess our own predilection for the idea that, at a certain period, 

 however remotely antecedent, the Creator endowed certain 

 forms of inorganic matter with the properties requisite to 

 enable them to combine at the fitting season into the human 

 organism, — over that which would lead us to regard the great- 

 grandfather of our common progenitor as a chimpanzee. 



A little later, however, he seemed to be somewhat 

 more favourably inclined to the general proposition, as a 

 matter of a priori probability, though the evidence of 

 science then appeared to him clearly to indicate "the non- 

 ^' convertibility of species really distinct;" and in one of 

 a scries of papers published in the Inquirer, in 1845, on 

 "The Harmony of Science and Religion," he thus pointed 

 out the important analogies on which he afterwards dwelt 

 so much, between the presence of design in the evolution 

 of the solar system, in the evolution of any given human 



