SPECIAL CREATION OR DERIVATION? 



development seemed quite as incredible as the 

 former. The process by which a structureless 

 germ, assimilating nutriment from the blood of 

 the parent organism, becomes gradually differ- 

 entiated into such an amazingly complex crea- 

 ture as a man or an elephant was not at that 

 time understood. It seemed utterly incredible 

 that a human infant could have so recently been 

 a simple globule of protoplasm. It was accord- 

 ingly maintained that, since an infant resembles 

 an adult in most respects save that of size, the 

 original germ must be a minute copy of the in- 

 fant. From the germ to the adult man there 

 was no increase in complexity, there was only 

 increase in dimensions. As a necessary conse- 

 quence the germs of each generation were con- 

 tained within the germs of the next preceding 

 generation ; so that in Mother Eve were con- 

 tained the miniature originals of the entire hu- 

 man race, completely shaped in every feature, 

 and shut up one within another, like a series of 

 Chinese boxes ! 



This hypothesis now strikes us as superla- 

 tively absurd. But it has been upheld by some 

 of the greatest biologists who have ever lived, 

 — by Swammerdamm, Haller, Bonnet, Reau- 

 mur, and Cuvier, — and to my mind it is less 

 grotesque than the hypothesis of special crea- 

 tions. But what now concerns us is the fact 

 that the doom of the latter hypothesis is inevi- 

 399 



