73 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pleasure lie asks : " Who would like to get different sorts of lions, 

 bears, tigers, and other ferocious and noxious creatures on board 

 ship ? who would trust himself with them ? and who would wish 

 to plant colonies of such creatures in new, desirable lands ? " 



His conclusion is that plants and animals take their origin in 

 the lands wherein they are found an opinion which he brings 

 Moses to support with passages from the two narrations in Gene- 

 sis which imply generative force in earth and water. 



But in the eighteenth century matters had become even worse 

 for the theological view. To meet the difficulty the eminent 

 Benedictine, Dom Calmet, in his commentary expressed the belief 

 that all the species of a genus had originally formed one species, 

 and he dwelt on this view as one which enabled him to explain 

 the possibility of gathering all animals into the ark. This idea, 

 dangerous as it was to the fabric of orthodoxy and involving a 

 profound separation from the general doctrine of the Church, 

 seems to have been abroad among thinking men, for we find in 

 the latter half of the same century even Linnseus incline to con- 

 sider it. It was, indeed, time that some new theological theory 

 be evolved; the great Linnseus himself, in spite of his famous 

 declaration in favor of the fixity of species, had dealt a death 

 blow to the old theory. In his Systema Naturae, published in the 

 middle of the eighteenth century, he had enumerated four thou- 

 sand species of animals, and the difficulties involved in the nam- 

 ing of each of them by Adam and in bringing them together in the 

 ark appeared to all thinking men more and more insurmountable. 



What was more embarrassing, the number of distinct species 

 went on increasing rapidly, indeed enormously, until as an emi- 

 nent zoological authority of our own time has declared, "For 

 every one of the species enumerated by Linnseus, more than fifty 

 kinds are known to the naturalist of to-day, and the number of 

 species still unknown doubtless far exceeds the list of those 

 recorded." 



Already there were premonitions of the strain made upon 

 Scripture by requiring a hundred and sixty distinct miraculous 

 interventions of the Creator to produce the hundred and sixty 

 species of land shells found in the little island of Madeira alone, 

 and fourteen hundred distinct interventions to produce the actual 

 number of distinct species of a single well-known shell. 



Ever more and more difficult, too, became this question of the 

 geographical distribution of animals. As new explorations were 

 made in various parts of the world, this danger to the theological 

 view went on increasing. The sloths in South America suggested 

 painful questions : how could animals so sluggish have got away 

 from the neighborhood of Mount Ararat so completely and have 

 traveled so far ? 



