736 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



But, noble as the work of these men was, the foundation of 

 fact on which they reared it became evidently more and more in- 

 secure. 



As far back as the seventeenth century far-sighted theolo- 

 gians had begun to discern difficulties more serious than any that 

 had before confronted them. More and more it was seen that the 

 number of different species was far greater than the world had 

 hitherto imagined. Greater and greater had become the old diffi- 

 culty in conceiving that, of these innumerable species, each had 

 been specially created by the Almighty hand, that each had been 

 brought before Adam by the Almighty to be named, and that 

 each, in couples or in sevens, had been gathered by Noah into 

 the ark. But the difficulties thus suggested were as nothing com- 

 pared to those raised by the distribution of animals. 



Even in the first days of the Church this had aroused serious 

 thought, and above all in the great mind of St. Augustine. In his 

 City of God he had stated the difficulty as follows : " But there is 

 a question about all these kinds of beasts, which are neither 

 tamed by man, nor spring from the earth like frogs, such as 

 wolves and others of that sort, ... as to how they could find 

 their way to the islands after that flood which destroyed every 

 living thing not preserved in the ark. . . . Some, indeed, might 

 be thought to reach islands by swimming, in case these were very 

 near ; but some islands are so remote from continental lands that 

 it does not seem possible that any creature could reach them by 

 swimming. It is not an incredible thing, either, that some ani- 

 mals may have been captured by men and taken with them to 

 those lands which they intended to inhabit, in order that they 

 might have the pleasure of hunting, and it can not be denied that 

 the transfer may have been accomplished through the agency of 

 angels, commanded or allowed to perform this labor by God." 



But this question had now assumed a magnitude of which St. 

 Augustine never dreamed. Most powerful of all agencies to 

 increase this difficulty were the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da 

 Gama, Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci, and other great navigators 

 of the period of discovery. Still more serious became the diffi- 

 culty as the continent islands of the southern seas were ex- 

 plored. Every navigator brought home tidings of new species of 

 animals and of races of men living in parts of the world where 



to demonstrate the Truth and Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of 

 the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society, London, 1701. For Paley and the 

 Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions ; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's 

 couplet ran as follows : 



" Welche Verehrung verdient der Weltenerschopfer, der Gnadig, 

 Als er den Korkbaum erschuf, gleich auch die Stopfel erfand." 

 For the quotation from Zoeckler, see his work already cited, vol. ii, pp. 74, 440. 



