586 SOME OBJECTIONS TO THE EVOLUTION THEORY. 



place. On the contrary, the ameHorated circumstances and wider range of 

 the new continents enabled it still further to improve; ease and abundance 

 perfected what struggle and privation had begun ; it added to ihe rude arts 

 of the Glacial period ; it parted with its shaggy hair, now unnecessary; its 

 features became softer, and it returned to vegetable food. Language sprang 

 up from the attempt to articulate natural sounds; fire making was invented 

 and new arts arose. At length the spiritual nature, potentiall}' IDreseut in 

 the creature, was awakened by some access of fear or some grand and ter- 

 rible jDhysical phenomenon ; the idea of a higher intelligence was struck 

 out, and the descendant of the apes became a sujDcrstitious and idolatrous 

 savage." 



It is unnecessary to follow the quotation any further to show how he 

 came at last to obtain possession of religious ideas, since the stern and in- 

 exorable logic of Spencer leads irresistibly to the same conclusion as the- 

 recent declarations of Tj-ndall, namely : the exclusion of a knowledge of 

 a Creator and the possibility of his works ; and hence the poor savage 

 would waste his time in elaborating any system of religion or religious 

 faith. 



In opposition to this theory of the origin of man, the following points 

 are urged : 



JPirst. — There is nothing in the science of natural history which tends 

 to sustain the idea of the simpler forms of life continuing to progress and 

 change into the more complex forms. In all such physical changes the opera- 

 tions of Nature are in a circle; the seed charges into a plant, a shrub, a 

 tree; the tree gives ofP seed and dies. So in animal life; like begets like, and 

 no amount of hj'bridizing can change the essential characters of the parent 

 stock into a new order or sjDecies. In this view such naturalists as Profes- 

 sor Kolliker and M. Flourens concur, and Pseschel, author of the "Kaces of 

 Man," clearly dem^onstrates that among the sharply defined animal forms 

 any abandonment of original types is followed by the complete extinction 

 of the famil}^ We see in ever}^ day life that plants and animals changed 

 from their ordinary forms by cultivation and hybridizing, will return ta 

 their original forms when neglected and allowed to run wild. 



Second. — The theory of Creation must be admitted by even those evolu- 

 tionists who, for the origin of life on the earth, go back of protoplasm, Mo- 

 neres and Bathybius to the meteoric dust of Sir William Thompson. The 

 process of life must commence somewhere, and the whole theorj^ must rest 

 at last ujDon creative force, for it is just as difficult to account for the origin 

 of the most infinitesimal protoplastic germ or atom of meteoric dust as for 

 any one of the complicated organisms of higher life. 



Third. — Animal forms running back to the Foraminifera of the Primor- 

 dial ages, the Nautili and cuttle fishes of the Silurian, the Placoid fishes of 

 the Permian, and the turtles and crocodiles of the Cretaceous, but more 

 particularly, the animals known to be identical in time of origin with man, 

 not less than 6,000 years ago, have come down to us without intermingling 



