ON THE CREATION AND GOD. 27 



descended withered earlier, as other branches have done : 

 had even any of the antecedent branches, which bore 

 other diverging types as well as the human, perished 

 earlier, assuredly man would not have appeared. The 

 splendid series of accidents which prepared the way 

 for him and made his advent possible, could not have 

 happened twice ; in which case Nature would have had 

 another master the dog, the horse, the elephant, or 

 some other promising species now kept in the back- 

 ground, and whose " genius is rebuked " by man's over- 

 shadowing superiority. 



On the Darwinian hypothesis, man is the child of 

 Chance, as from the Evolution Hypothesis, in its full 

 generality, all life is the result of chance. An eminent 

 expositor of the truths of physical science, and an elo- 

 quent expounder and advocate of the evolution hypothesis, 

 Professor Tyndall, by implication denies this. He affirms 

 that in the primitive nebular vapour all the future de- 

 velopments of the universe were potentially contained : 

 life, man ; his philosophy, poetry, art, science ; Plato, 

 Shakespeare, Newton, Raphael. Speaking of the evolu- 

 tion hypothesis, he says, " For what are the core and 

 essence of this hypothesis ? Strip it naked, and you 

 stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more 

 ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the 

 nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exqui- 

 site and wonderful mechanism of the 'human body, but 

 that the human mind itself emotion, intellect, will, and 

 all their phenomena were once latent in a fiery cloud. . . . 

 But the hypothesis would probably go even further than 

 this. Many who hold it would probably assent to the 

 position that at the present moment all our philosophy, 

 all our poetry, all our science, and all our art Plato, 

 Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael are potential in the 



