EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 271 
acts of creation have been? Let us try to imagine 
one. We need not dread too close an approach to 
detail. This is a world of detail; details, in short, are 
what it consists of. Try, then, to imagine the special 
creation of a lobster. Was there ever a particular 
moment when the protein-molecules spontaneously 
rushed together from all points of the compass and 
aggregated themselves into a complicated system of 
tissues, fleshy, fatty, vitreous, and calcareous, and fur- 
thermore took on the forms of divers organs, diges- 
tive, sensitive, and locomotive, until that marvellous 
creature, the lobster, might have been seen in his per- 
fection where a moment before there was absolute 
vacancy? One may not say that such a thing is im- 
possible, but it surely does not commend itself to the 
modern mind as altogether probable. Yet in what 
other way we are to think of special creation is not 
easy to point out, unless we are prepared to assent to 
the negro preacher who graphically described the 
Creator as moulding Adam out of damp clay and set- 
ting him up against the fence to dry. The advocates 
of special creations naturally shrank from attempts to 
clothe their hypothesis with details, and deemed it 
safer, as well as more reverent, to een it into the 
regions of the unknown. 
Now what Darwin did was the same sort of thing 
that Newton and Lyell had done. He asked aa? 
if there was not some simple and familiar cause now 
operating to modify plants and animals which could 
be shown to have been in operation through past ages; 
and furthermore, if such a cause could not be proved 
adequate to bring about truly specific changes. We 
are familiar with the production of new breeds of 
