NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 143 



doubt that it would have been universally scoffed at in 

 the scientific world, such as it then was, or, at the best, 

 interpreted in a thousand wrong ways in conformity with 

 ideas already familiar. The experiments above described, 

 finding a public mind which had never discovered a fact 

 or conceived an idea at all analogous, were of course 

 ungraciously received. It was held to be impious, even 

 to surmise that animals could have been formed through 

 any instrumentality of an apparatus devised hy human 

 skill. The more likely account of the phenomena w^as 

 said to be, that the insects were only develoj^ed from ova, 

 resting either in the fiuid, or in the wooden frame on 

 which the experiments took place. On these objections 

 the following remarks may be made. The supposition 

 of impiety arises from an entire misconception of what is 

 implied by an aboriginal creation of insects'. The ex- 

 perimentalist could never be considered as the author of 

 the existence of these creatures, except by the most un- 

 reasoning ignorance. The utmost that can be claimed 

 for, or imputed to him is that he arranged the natural 

 conditions under which the true creative energy — that 

 fiowing from the primordial appointment of the Divine 

 Author of all things — was pleased to work in that in- 

 stance. On the hypothesis here brought forward, the 

 acarus Crossii was a type of being ordained from the 

 beginning, and destined to be realised under certain 

 physical conditions. When a human hand brought these 

 conditions into the proper arrangement, it did an act 

 akin to hundreds of familiar ones which we execute every 

 day, and which are followed by natural results; but it 

 <lid nothing more. The production of the insect, if it 

 did take place as assumed, was as clearly an act of the 

 Almighty himself, as if he had fashioned it with hands. 

 For the presumption tliat an tict of aboriginal creation 



