THE VITAL FORCE. 67 



It is indeed remarkable that in the teeth of these 

 words the religious sentiments of men should have 

 been roused against the opinion that the earth and 

 the waters brought forth, or might be supposed pro- 

 bably to have brought forth, living creatures. And 

 more especially does this appear strange when we 

 find that the natural and obvious meaning of the 

 words is still further established to be in favour of 

 what has been called " spontaneous generation,*' by 

 the arguments founded on them by some of the 

 Christian Fathers : Saint Augustine urging, on this 

 very ground, that the assembling of the animals in 

 the ark must have been for the sake of prefiguring 

 the gathering of all nations into the Church, and not 

 in order to secure the replenishing of the world with 

 life.* 



That there is nothing which ought to excite dis- 

 trust in the view of the, so called, spontaneous origin 

 of living creatures may be further confirmed by a 

 curious passage which occurs in Bacon's Atlantis, 

 and which, irrational though it doubtless is, shows in 



* Quoted in the firat Tohnne of Cosmo*. 



52 



