6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



included in the work of the six days"; and that "even new 

 species, if any appear, have existed before in certain native 

 properties, just as animals are produced from putrefaction." 



The distinction thus developed between creation "causally" 

 or "potentially," and "materially" or "formally," was made 

 much of by commentators afterward. Cornelius a Lapide spread 

 it by saying that certain animals were created not " absolutely," 

 but only " derivatively," and this thought was still further devel- 

 oped three centuries later by Augustinus Eugubinus, who tells 

 us that, after the first creative energy had called forth land and 

 water, light was made by the Almighty, the instrument of all 

 future creation, and that the light called everything into exist- 

 ence. 



All this " science falsely so called," so sedulously developed 

 by the great minds of the Church, and yet so futile that we might 

 almost suppose that the great apostle, in a glow of prophetic 

 vision, had foreseen it in his famous condemnation, seems at this 

 distance very harmless indeed ; yet, to many guardians of the 

 " sacred deposit of doctrine " in the Church, even so slight a de- 

 parture from the main current of thought seemed dangerous. It 

 appeared to them like pressing the doctrine of secondary causes 

 to a perilous extent ; and about the beginning of the seventeenth 

 century we have the eminent Spanish Jesuit and theologian 

 Suarez denouncing it, and declaring St. Augustine a heretic for 

 his share in setting it in motion. 



But there was little danger to the older idea just then ; the 

 main theological tendency was so strong that the world kept on 

 as of old ; biblical theology continued to spin its own webs out of 

 its own bowels, and all the lesser theological flies continued to be 

 entangled in them ; yet here and there stronger thinkers broke 

 loose from this entanglement and helped somewhat to disentangle 

 others.* 



But while within the Church the current of evolutionary 

 thought was almost lost to sight, it continued in its clearer form, 



* For Bede's view of the ark and the origin of insects, see his Hexsemeron, i and ii ; 

 for Isidore, see the Etymologise, xi, 4, and xiii, 22 ; for Peter Lombard, see Sent., lib. ii, 

 dist. xv, 4 (in Migne, cxcii, 682) ; for St. Thomas Aquinas as to the laws of Nature, see 

 Summa Theologica, i, Quaest. Ixvii, art. iv ; for his discussion on Avicenna's Theory of 

 the origin of animals, see ibid., Qusest. Ixxi, vol. i, pp. 1184 and 1185, of Migne's edit. ; 

 for his idea as to the word of God being the active producing principle, see ibid., i, Quaest. 

 Ixxi, art. i ; for his remarks on species, see ibid., i, Qusest. Ixxii, art. i ; for his ideas on the 

 necessity of the procreation of man, see ibid., i, Quaest. Ixxii, art. i ; for the origin of ani- 

 mals from putrefaction, see ibid., i, Qusest. Ixxix, art. i, 3 ; for Cornelius a Lapide on the 

 derivative creation of animals, see his In Genesim Comment., cap. i, cited by Mivart, 

 Genesis of Species, p. 282 ; for a reference to Suarez's denunciation of the view of St. 

 Augustine, see Huxley's Essays. 



