22 EVOLUTIONS OF ORGANIZATION. 
is anything apart from the accidents of external 
circumstances to direct the paths of the whole 
world-history of life, and thus shuts out of con- 
sideration the whole class of phenomena which 
were not only built on by Oken, but were patent 
to St. Hilaire, and Owen, and Goodsir; and it 
not only leaves both sex and symmetry unaccounted 
for, but renders them inexplicable, although they 
are matters obvious to every one, and pervading the 
whole organic world. 
It is worthy of notice that the position taken, 
with admirable moderation, by Darwin himself, 
that livigg forms have originated from a very few 
progenitors, is no aid to the conception of con- 
tinuity, unless there be added the doctrine of 
spontaneous generation,—the absence of evidence 
for which has been the subject of an honest and 
pathetic wail from an eminent Darwinian. Either 
the assumed primordial forms sent onward, in the 
stream of heredity to future ova, a something not 
derived from external circumstances, or they owed 
all their properties to the operation of the laws of 
dead matter. If they were the accidental evolu- 
tions of dead matter,—that is spontaneous genera- 
tion. If they owed their properties to another 
source, then every ovum that exists has similar 
properties distinct from those of dead matter, as 
