548 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



from all points of the compass? Or must we receive the old Hebrew idea that 

 God takes clay and molds a new creature? 



On these matters the theory remained judiciously non-committal. 

 But it maintained, at all events, that the vast majority of species, how- 

 ever created, were destined to be in turn destroyed — and destroyed by 

 the operation of natural forces. The Great Artificer could fashion, but 

 he was either unable or unwilling to protect, the creatures his imagina- 

 tion had devised. When ordinary physical processes were too much for 

 them, sweeping them off by groups, or even, according to the favorite 

 variant of the theory, obliterating them altogether, he was obliged to 

 start afresh; whether this happened four or twelve or twenty-seven or 

 thirty thousand times was a detail about which the partisans of the 

 doctrine could not agree. The forms thus later produced did not al- 

 ways differ markedly for the better from their unfortunate precursors ; 

 many primitive and rather unsuccessful models continued to be re- 

 peated. But in general, as time went on, the Creator brought both 

 more diverse and more complicated beings into existence. In doing so, 

 he behaved after the manner of a lazy and incompetent architect, who, 

 instead of " studying " each problem afresh, with reference to the 

 special uses and situation of the edifice to be erected, is content to make 

 a few minor alterations in a single conventionalized plan. The " unity 

 of type " of organisms destined to the most dissimilar modes of exist- 

 ence was generally dilated upon with devout enthusiasm by the special 

 creationists. They seem to have regarded it as an agreeable mannerism 

 of the Creator's personal style. But it is the kind of mannerism which, 

 in a human designer, is commonly ascribed to indolence or limited in- 

 telligence. Indeed, the parallel of the lazy architect was inadequate to 

 represent the whole singularity of the Creator's mode of construction. 

 He not only used as few general models as possible, but he also — when, 

 with a cleared field, he created a fresh group of organisms — repro- 

 duced in them organs and members which had been functional and 

 useful in their predecessors, but were with the new species useless, 

 meaningless, and even disadvantageous — like the proverbial Chinese 

 tailor, who laboriously imitates all the rents and stains in the dis- 

 carded European garment given him as a model. Finally, the Creator 

 was supposed to have implanted in all organisms the senseless habit 

 of mimicking, in the embryonic stages of the individual's development, 

 the forms of other and extinct organisms to which that individual bore 

 no relation of kinship. 



Such — with the details absolutely required by the accepted scien- 

 tific knowledge of the time — was the hypothesis tenaciously held by 

 most men of science for at least twenty years before 1859. "With the 

 greater number of them the motives for holding it were primarily 

 theological; yet the thing that now impresses us in the theory is its 

 extraordinarily irreligious, not to say blasphemous, character. Science 



