SPECIAL CREATION OR DERIVATION ? 



" free action of an Intelligent Power," very 

 much as the cuttle-fish extricates itself from a 

 disagreeable predicament by hiding in a shower 

 of its own ink. But, however commendable 

 such phrases may be when regarded as a gen- 

 eral confession of faith, they are much worse 

 than useless when employed as substitutes for a 

 scientific description of facts. They only serve 

 to encourage that besetting sin of human think- 

 ing which accepts a play upon words as an 

 equivalent for a legitimate juxtaposition of valid 

 conceptions. 



When translated, however, from the dialect 

 of mythology into the dialect of science, the 

 special creation hypothesis asserts that the un- 

 told millions of organic molecules of which an 

 adult mammal is composed all rushed together 

 at some appointed instant from divers quarters 

 of the compass, and, spontaneously or in vir- 

 tue of some inexplicable divine sorcery, grouped 

 themselves into the form of an adult organism, 

 some of them arranging themselves into infi- 

 nitely complicated nerve-fibres and ganglionic 

 cells, others into the wonderfully complex con- 

 tractile tissue of muscles, while others again 

 were massed in divers convoluted shapes, as 

 lungs, intestines, blood-vessels, and secreting 

 glands. Or, if a different form of statement be 

 preferred, at one moment we have a background 

 of landscape, with its water and its trees, its 



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