202 REV. A. IRVING, D.SC., B.A., ON 
back the first appearance of the homo on this planet, to 
hundreds of thousands of years. But whatever the date of 
his first appearance may be—and perhaps we shall never 
know—I think we may fairly contend that Man, as he is 
represented to us in the Adham of the early chapters of 
Genesis, appears at a much more recent date, and that he 
received, as a special endowment from his Creator, those 
faculties which carry with them moral responsibility. This 
contention was sustained by me in the Gwardian,* and chal- 
lenged by Dr. Astley and Mr. Woods Smyth. The latter 
gentleman (who is known in this Institute) maintained that 
“evolution is sufficient to account for the whole chain of 
sequences from the /Protiste to Man in the highest sense.” 
I had only to let him refute himself; for after elaborating 
this statement in the first paragraph of his letter (Dec. 23), 
he occupied the second half of his letter in contending for 
what constructively amounts to a special Divine interposition 
at the incoming of man (sc. more than homo) upon the stage of 
Creation. He even quoted Samuel Laing (for what his opinion 
may be worth) as saying that “there is no evidence of any 
people having arisen by themselves out of a state of savagery.” 
He continues— This then is the most significant place in human 
history; this is the time when the same Divine Being, who 
had been disciplining life for long ages up to mun’s estate by 
natural conditions, now, at the demand of, and in harmony with, 
the position man had reached, came into intelligent converse 
with His intelligent creature in a new and higher form.” So 
Mr. Woods Smyth, I may fairly think, surrenders his case to 
my contention all the way through, that something more (and 
more special) than evolution in the Darwinian, or the Spencerian, 
or the Haeckelian sense of the word, is required to account for 
all the cognizable facts. (See further Z’rans. Vict. Inst., vol. xl, 
pp. 136-139). He seems to fall into line with the dictum of 
the great Apostle (1 Cor. xv, 46), “That is not first which is 
spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is 
spiritual.” We cannot in the nature of things expect to find 
auy physical record of this. The important point is that (so far 
as we can see) the teaching of Science leaves us free to accept 
the view of the place assigned to the Adham (the Man) in the 
pictorial grouping of facts about Man as the centre, which is 
put before us with much legendary embellishment in the second 
Genesis description of the Creation, and of Man’s place in it, as 
* Dec. 9th and 23rd, 1908. 
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