1394 The Zoologist— October, 1808. 



Such is Mr. Darwin's own admission, and such his explanation of the 

 admission. Candid, courteous and transparently truthful, it seems 

 hard thus to quote Mr. Darwin against himself, but the facts must 

 remain that there is an entire absence of all evidence that such inter- 

 mediates ever existed, and the only conclusion to which the rocks can 

 possibly lead us is that such intermediates never did exist. It is 

 notorious to the geologist that the elephant, the sloth, the stag, the 

 tortoise, the shark, come before us with no feeble or uncertain form : 

 they exhibit no gradation from what are called inferior beings ; far 

 from this, they evidently leaped into life in the zenith of their glory, in 

 the plenitude of power, strength and bulk. Mr. Darwin asks of those 

 naturalists (if such there be) who advocate the theory of successive 

 creation, " Do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the 

 earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded sud- 

 denly to flash into living tissues?" Certainly, there is no more diffi- 

 culty in believing this than believing in the creation of an "elemental 

 atom." " These authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of 

 creation than at an ordinary birth." Confessedly so ; but the anti- 

 thesis might have been still more striking if worded thus, " These 

 authors seem no more startled at the miraculous creation of a mastodon 

 than of an elemental atom." The obvious reason is they believe the 

 Almighty equally competent to either case. The simplest form, con- 

 sidered as an object to be called into existence, presents no greater 

 facility than the most complicated ; all acts of creation are equally 

 removed from the sphere of man's feeble powers, but are equally within 

 the range of Almighty will. But, admitting the grandeur, the ineffable 

 grandeur, of the miraculous creation of a mastodon, it is in reality far 

 less difficult to believe, than the entire destruction of all trace of those 

 myriads of generations which must have been required to evolve a 

 mastodon from either of the oolite monstrosities. We are required to 

 give up our faith in one miracle in order that we may receive a 

 miracle infinitely more astounding: we are forbidden to strain at a 

 gnat in order that we may swallow a camel. I fully believe in the 

 possibility of the stupendous miracle of obliterating all trace of those 

 supposed generations which have led up to the present status of 

 organized beings ; but I am utterly at a loss to conceive the cui bono 

 of such a miracle. I think also the unprejudiced reader cannot fail to 

 be struck with the importance given to magnitude by all the evolu- 

 tionists to such terms as " elementary atom," " molecule," " proto- 

 germ," " monad," &c., &c, being in frequent requisition : now T regard 



