rh. ix.l SPECIAL-CREA1I0N OR DERIVATION t 441 



scientific description of facts. They only serve to encourage 

 that besetting sin of human thinking, 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 untold 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 virtue of some inexplicable divine 

 sorcery, grouped themselves into the form of an adult 

 organism, some of them arranging themselves into infinitely 

 complicated nerve-fibres and ganglionic cells, others into the 

 wonderfully complex contractile 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 sands and its herbage, and at the next succeeding 

 moment we have in the foreground an ox or a man, or, 

 according to another view, a herd of oxen and a group of 

 men, and all this without any assignable group of physical 

 antecedents intervening ! He who can believe that St. Goar, 

 of Treves, transformed a sunbeam into a hat-peg, or that men 

 were once changed into werewolves by putting on an en- 

 chanted girdle, or that Joshua and Cardinal Ximenes con- 

 strained the earth to pause in its rotation, will probably find 

 no difficulty in accepting such a hypothesis to account for 

 the origin of men and oxen. To persons in such a stage of 

 culture it is no obstacle to any hypothesis that it involves an 

 assumption as to divine interposition which is incapable ot 

 scientific investigation and uninterpretable in terms of human 

 experience. It can hardly be denied, however, that any 

 hypothesis which involves such an assumption is at once 

 excluded from the pale of science, and relegated to the 



