' 22 EVOLUTIONS OF ORGANIZATION. 



is anything apart from the accidents of external 

 circumstances to direct the paths of the whole 

 world-history of life, and thus shuts out of con- 

 sideration the whole class of phenomena which 

 were not only built on by Oken, but were patent 

 to St. Hilaire, and Owen, and Goodsir ; and it 

 not only leaves both sex and symmetry unaccounted 

 for, but renders them inexplicable, although they 

 are matters obvious to every one, and pervading the 

 whole organic world. 



It is worthy of notice that the position taken, 

 with admirable moderation, by Darwin himself, 

 that living forms have originated from a very few 

 progenitors, is no aid to the conception of con- 

 tinuity, unless there be added the doctrine of 

 spontaneous generation, the absence of evidence 

 for which has been the subject of an honest and 

 pathetic wail from an eminent Darwinian. Either 

 the assumed primordial forms sent onward, in the 

 stream of heredity to future ova, a something not 

 derived from external circumstances, or they owed 

 all their properties to the operation of the laws of 

 dead matter. If they were the accidental evolu- 

 tions of dead matter, that is spontaneous genera- 

 tion. If they owed their properties to another 

 source, then every ovum that exists has similar 

 properties distinct from those of dead matter, as 



