Comment and Discussion. iii 



the accident of a few grains of sand falling foul of a cell, a 

 hundred millions of years ago. We have given up the 

 idea of design in Nature to that extent. Nature neither 

 lets nor hinders ; the liberty of cosmos can in no other 

 way be conserved. Why speak of design ? Nature needs 

 not design. 



With greater justice one of the associate editors of the 

 American Journal of Science calls attention to the fact 

 that the cells of polyzoa — hristadella mucedo, for example, 

 cited on page 28 — are more fully organized than I have 

 seemed to describe them. 



This is a deserved criticism, and I am glad to record it 

 here. At this late age of the earth's vital history, it is 

 not easy to find illustrations of early metazoons. None 

 the less, we would be slow to believe with the elder 

 Agassiz, that all the present metazoons were " created " as 

 we behold them. Bristadella mucedo was cited in this 

 connection, not as being one of the early simple unions of 

 unicellular life, but merely as resembling externally, per- 

 haps, what these early unions might have been like. 



The point really at issue here is whether the metazoons 

 developed from unicells, or that the tissue cells of the 

 animal organism form, multitudinously, in this same 

 organism after it was otherwise created. The former posi- 

 tion is the one held in Natural Salvation. 



A reviewing editor writes to aisk, " Is this natural sal- 



