138 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
are so extremely inconvenient to the dogmatic conception 
of the permanence of species, naturalists to a great extent. 
intentionally did not concern themselves about them, and 
even celebrated naturalists have often expressed the opinion 
that cultivated organisms, domesticated animals and garden 
plants, are artificial productions of man, and that their 
formation and transformation could not decide anything 
about the nature of species and about the origin of the 
forms of species that live in a natural state. 
This perverse view went so-far that, for example, Andreas 
Wagner, a zoologist of Munich, quite seriously made the 
following ridiculous assertion:—‘ Animals and plants in 
their wild state have been called into being by the Creator 
as distinctly different and unchangeable species ; but in the 
case of domestic animals and cultivated plants this was not. 
necessary, because he formed them from the beginning for the 
use of man. The Creator formed man out of a clod of earth, 
breathed the living breath into his nostrils, and then created 
for him the different useful domestic animals and garden 
plants, among which he thought well to save himself the 
trouble of distinguishing species.” Unfortunately, Andreas 
Wagner does not tell us whether the Tree of Knowledge 
in Paradise was a “good” wild species, or, as a cultivated 
plant, “no species” at all. As the Tree of Knowledge was 
placed by the Creator in the centre of Paradise, we might 
be inclined to believe that it was a highly favoured culti- 
vated plant, and therefore no species at all. But since, on 
the other hand, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was 
forbidden to man, and since many men, as Wagner himself 
clearly shows, have never eaten of the fruit, it was 
evidently not created for the use of man, and therefore in 
