SPECIES. 123 



system winch the best telescope can observe. The extent alone 

 of the heavens can give us an idea of the extent of the past. 



This being granted, let us see how we can represent the 

 history of organic development upon the earth in a few words, 

 without hiding from ourselves the immense obscurity which 

 covers all origins. We are here expressing merely a hypo- 

 thesis. It will suffice us to see if this hypothesis will agree in 

 a satisfactory manner with the facts noticed at the present 

 day, on the surface and in the interior of the globe. 



At the origin of the vertebrate world, since we are only 

 examining this, it seems rational to admit a primordial com- 

 mencement, which nothing prevents us from considering as a 

 new and special combination of organic matter, derived from 

 the invertebrate world, which we may believe to have formerly 

 existed. In the heart of this embryo will have appeared, by 

 spontaneous generation, the first organism connected with the 

 vertebrate type. This was, doubtless, a simple anatomical 

 element, like that which histologists see every day formed in 

 certain granular liquids. 



We do not imagine that the origin of life can be otherwise 

 represented ; for to admit, as Isidore Geoffrey has done in cer- 

 tain passages of his works, that the will of a God peopled the 

 earth suddenly with perfect beings, fit for producing other 

 beings like themselves, would be to admit a miracle, and 

 science teaches us at the present day what to think of all 

 divine interventions, either past or present.* 



We defy anyone to get out of this alternative, either that 

 there was an instantaneous and miraculous creation of a cer- 

 tain number of perfect animals ;t or that there was a succes- 



* [Our author is quite right. Science does teach us what to think of divine 

 power in its outward manifestations. The more we understand nature, 

 the more ready will earnest-minded men be to praise and give glory to 

 the God who made it, who created man and beast with such marvellous and 

 exquisite regularity, and who continues to govern the world and all that is 

 upon it. Perhaps M. Pouchet thinks he himself could have made a better 

 one. It is a pity that a clever mind is so warped by that science which 

 ought to make him more satisfied than ever that God is the creator of the 

 world ; and that spontaneous generation, and the never-clearly explained 

 origin of the first matter, about which even M. Pouchet cannot tell us, with 

 all his scepticism, ought to go to pave the "pathway of good intentions." 

 EDITOR.] 



f [Why not ? EDITOR.] 



