726 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for the hurtful creatures, we are either punished, or disciplined, 

 or terrified by them, so that we may not cherish and love this 

 life/* As to the "superfluous animals," he says, "Although they 

 are not necessary for our service, yet the whole design of the 

 universe is thereby completed and finished." Luther, who fol- 

 lowed St. Augustine in so many other matters, declined to follow 

 him fully in this. To him a fly was not merely superfluous, it 

 was noxious sent by the devil, and perhaps possessed by the 

 devil, to trouble him when reading. 



Another subject which gave rise to much searching of the 

 Scriptures and long trains of theological reasoning, was the dif- 

 ference between the creation of man and that of other living 

 beings. 



Great stress was laid by theologians from St. Basil and St. 

 Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet, and from Luther 

 to Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in Genesis, God 

 having created man " in his own image " ; what this statement 

 meant was seen in the light of the later biblical statement that 

 "Adam begat Seth in his own likeness, after his image." 



In view of this and well-known texts incorporated from older 

 creation legends into the Hebrew sacred books it came to be 

 widely held that, while man was directly molded and fashioned 

 separately by the Creator's hand, the animals generally were 

 evoked in numbers from the earth and sea by the Creator's voice. 



A question now arose naturally as to the distinctions of species 

 among animals. The vast majority of theologians agreed in 

 representing all animals as created "in the beginning," and 

 named by Adam, preserved in the ark, and continued ever after- 

 ward under exactly the same species. Some difficulties arose here 

 and there as zoology progressed and revealed ever-increasing 

 numbers of species ; but through the middle ages, and indeed 

 long after the Reformation, this difficulty was easily surmounted : 

 by making the ark of Noah larger and larger, and especially by 

 holding that there had been a human error in regard to the unit 

 of measurement for the ark, all difficulty was at first avoided.* 



But naturally there was developed among both ecclesiastics 

 and laymen a human desire to go beyond these special points in 

 the history of animated beings a desire to know what the crea- 

 tion really is. 



* For St. Augustine, see De Genesi and De Trinitate, passim ; for Bede, see Hexaeme- 

 ron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-38, 42 ; and De Sex Dierum Creatione, in Migne, 

 tome, xciii, p. 215; for Peter Lombard on "noxious animals," see his Sententias, lib ii, 

 dist. xv, 3, Migne, tome cxcii, p. 682 ; for Wesley, Clarke, and Watson, see quotations from 

 them and notes thereto in my chapter on Geology ; for St. Augustine on " superfluous 

 animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, cap. xvi, 26 ; on Luther's view of flies, see the Table 

 Talk and his famous utterance, " Odio muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et hsereticorum." 



