THEORIES or NATURAL SELECTION AND DESIGN. 53 



author tells us that the fish began to breathe air after being thrown upon 

 the beach and undergoing some alteration of the swim-bladder, so as to 

 form a rudimentary lung. But you will observe that the swim-bladder of 

 a fish possessing that organ — for all of them have not got it — is exactly 

 adapted for the purpose it is intended to serve, which is to render the 

 creature specifically lighter than it would otherwise be, so that it is the 

 more buoyant and better able to rise and sink in the dense medium it 

 inhabits. Now, if that swim-bladder were operated upon by the atmo- 

 sphere so as to be folded up and become a sort of lung, when the creature 

 returned to the water it must do so with its swim-bladder less adapted to 

 its aquatic existence than before, and it certainly could not be for the good 

 of the fish that it should have to perform its movements with an inflamed 

 swim-bladder. It may be said that it was not the swim-bladder, but the 

 gills that were altered. Let us regard the matter from that point of view. 

 If the gills of a fish be exposed to the atmosphere, and the creature is forced 

 to breathe the external air without the intervention of the watery medium, 

 then we immediately perceive that the branchia become inflamed, and it 

 can hardly be said to be beneficial to the fish that it should return to the 

 water with inflammation of the branchia. Indeed, for my own part, I 

 think that this would have been decidedly to its disadvantage, and it appears 

 to me that, if that is the mode by which the great Creator — certain of whom 

 the evolutionists admit in the abstract — acted, having in the first instance 

 worked by the one plan and then having changed it for the other, it is — and 

 I say it with all due reverence — a very bungling method. It is much more 

 reasonable to suppose that the Almighty Creator should have placed in 

 some germ, such as an eggj all the potentiality required to produce the air- 

 breathing creature, rather than that He should go through the process of 

 creating some organ adapted for one purpose, and then should so alter it as 

 to adapt it to another, this change being so effected that its effect, in the 

 beginning of the metamorphosis, must have been to render the creature less 

 adapted to the purposes of its original form and mode of existence. (Hear, 

 hear.) I might illustrate this argument by many other examples. I might 

 take, for instance, the hind hands of the quadrumana. Surely it is only 

 reasonable to suppose that a creature with four perfect hands is much more 

 likely to succeed in the struggle for life among the forest trees it has to 

 climb, than one which has begun to lose the grasping power afforded by the 

 two hind thumbs. Again, it seems to me that for such a creature to lose 

 all the hairy covering of its body must have been extremely inconvenient, 

 and very much against its habits and mode of existence. I hold, therefore, 

 that we are not wrong in saying, at least until we are better informed, that 

 we do not admit what the evolutionists demand of us. (Hear, hear.) I 

 cannot accept the assumption that evolution, as it is presented to us, was 

 God's plan ; and I would write upon it the word '"' unproven," and 

 I think that the way in which the question is presented to our minds by 

 those who argue for a special creation is the better way. If God could, in 

 the first instance, put into one particular germ all the potentialities after- 



