ON CREATION OR EVOLUTION. J 89 



impossible to prove that they are not of use to their present 

 possessors. In truth according to the theory of special 

 creation, it is only in keeping Avith its basis to allow that the 

 original type of loau, for instance, was a more perfect 

 machine, if possible, than we find to be the case after several 

 thousand years of degeneration. Reference will be made 

 later to the subject of degeneration, Avhich is an important 

 factor in the histoiy of terrestrial life, insisted upon much 

 by evolutionists themselves. Certain vestigial characters in 

 man which are brought forward are irrelevant, others incor- 

 rectly stated, but it is not out of keeping with the theory of 

 creation that others, such as the muscles which move the 

 skin of the forehead and neck, those which extend from one 

 pai't of the pinna to the other, and those which are attached 

 to the side of the head and move the pinna, which are found 

 in a certain number of human subjects, other muscles which 

 are occasionally found connecting the sacrum and coccyx, 

 should be simply departures from a more perfect type and 

 cases in which degeneration through disuse liiis taken place ; 

 in fact that they are " vestigial " in a sense different from 

 that which is usually employed. The vermiform appendix 

 of the ceecum, called by Mr. Bland Sutton an " abdominal 

 tonsil," is as difficult to explain on the theory of design as 

 the tonsil itself, though there is a possible significance in the 

 commanding position which each occupies and the incidence 

 of microbic attacks upon each, by reason of the mass of 

 lymphoid tissue with which they abound. Its comparative 

 anatomy is singular. It is confined to man and the anthro- 

 poid apes, and is found only in one other animal, the curious 

 Australian marsupial, the wombat, and it appears to repre- 

 sent the long ca3cum of herbivorous animals in whom it is 

 functionally active. In the wombat Professor Struthers* 

 doubts if the tube which exists along the end of the ileum, 

 opening by the side of the ileum into the colon, is a true 

 appendix of the ca?cum. But to say the least of it, it is 

 remarkable to find a so-called " vestige " of this kind only in 

 man, the anthropoid apes, and a closel}' similar structure in a 

 low marsupial animal. Seeing that man is not supposed to 

 be the direct descendant of the higher apes now existing, 

 such an ancestry as is required for this little appendix 

 stretches back into the hoary antiquity of Miocene times, 



* On varieties of the appendix venniformis, ccectcm, and ileocceoal valve 

 in Man. John Struthers, M.D., p. 34. 



