THE MUSEUM HIS HEADQUARTERS 51 



to uphold them than I can discern at present in the Dar- 

 winian Theory. 



Agassiz in a later letter to Miiller, continues the 

 subject : — 



" I see and grant fully the objections you may make 

 to mathematical demonstrations as applied to organisms, 

 and we must always remember that in one case we deal 

 with simple f ormulae, in the other with organic products, 

 and here will always be the gulf separating the two. 

 If the Darwinian theory is the correct interpretation 

 of nature, you will be led naturally to the producing of 

 organic out of the inorganic, working during an infinite 

 time and through infinite forms. I do not see any escape 

 from a logical sequence of Darwin's principles, for if 

 you stop halfway and acknowledge a few primordial 

 forces, or one force, you are on no sounder or stronger 

 basis than the theorists who are always calling in the 

 interference of the Deity. Call it in once and you must 

 call it in always, and there is no more difficulty to imag- 

 ine a single interference than many. 



" I grant also the great force of your objections about 

 the ' similarity of all eggs of all classes in their first 

 stages,' but that has always seemed to me to be a very 

 strong argument against Darwin rather than for him. 

 If we can thus in a few weeks follow from eggs, laid by 

 animals of different classes, apparently identical, such 

 different results, but always the same as far as our ex- 

 perience goes, why has it never been given us to notice 

 the converse, and see these eggs developing into differ- 

 ent classes from the animals which laid them; and are 

 we justified in taking the intermediate forms as the 



