GEOLOGICAL MEMOJES. 



of the Creation, of which no living witness can give us information. 

 But the leaves lie before us imperfect, torn, scattered, and partially 

 obliterated ; we must arrange them and endeavour to supply what 

 is missing ; many gaps can be restored from other parts ; the in- 

 terpretation is often vague, and the discovery of new fragments 

 hitherto wanting often renders it necessary to correct earlier arrange- 

 ments" (p. 75.) 



The author then proceeds (p. 77) to describe the Creative force 

 in the following manner : — 



"■ We have stated that the great book of the history of the earth 

 describes all the events which took place during its formation, 

 and points out to us the succession of the forms of the organic king- 

 doms. But it leaves us entirely in the dark respecting the force 

 which produced the latter. We perceive that the same physical and 

 chemical natural forces which now guide and regulate all the move- 

 ments and changes in the inorganic world have also sufficed to 

 originate and to continue those which have formed the earth and 

 its crust ; but in the present day we see no new genera or species 

 arise ; the power which produced them is unknown to us, and even 

 the earth's strata do not afford us the means of deciphering it. The 

 humble naturalist who knows of no natural force which could form 

 species of plants and animals as attraction formed the spherical 

 heavenly bodies, and as affinity formed the crystallized varieties of 

 minerals, is disposed to consider them as the immediate emanation 

 of a divine creative act. But this same humble naturalist must also 

 say to himself that nothing else in nature acts by such a power, but 

 that everything is arranged and formed by universal laws implanted 

 in the matter itself ; that here also analogy necessarily leads us to 

 presuppose a similar, although to us unknown, power, which has 

 produced the species of plants and animals, and which perhaps, as 

 has been assumed by Lyell, still continues, although only on rare 

 occasions, to produce them." 



The author then alludes to the doctrine of generatio equivoca or 

 spontanea adopted by some authors, and the Lamarckian theory of 

 gradual transformation and adaptation, by which it was attempted to 

 get over some of these difficulties, and shows how they have been 

 disproved, observing that " no experience proves that any one species 

 or genus, or even an order or a class, has really been transformed 

 into another. And as for those palaeontologists who maintain that 

 only the first plants and animals of the earth were produced by im- 

 mediate creation, they have obtained no real simplification of the 

 laws of nature by merely limiting the period of immediate creation 

 to a somewhat shorter time. 



" We have, however, already stated that the naturalist would be 

 inconsistent were he to derive the organic world alone from an im- 

 mediate creation, whilst everything else comes and goes, arises and 

 disappears, by means of universally distributed, and eternal natural 

 forces, as occurs in the case of the propagation of a once existing 

 species of animal or plant by sexual descent, or by sprouting and 

 budding ; and that he would be equally inconsistent if he trusted to 



