THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 



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of God, the results, firsts of an impulse which had been imparted 

 to the forms of life, advancing them, by generation, through 

 various grades up to the highest animals and plants ; and, second, 

 of another impulse which tended to modify, in the course of 

 generations, the organic structures in accordance with external 

 circumstances. This work differs in many points from Darwin's, 

 especially in regard to Mutation, though some arguments are 

 common to both ; but these are wielded with much greater skill 

 by the trained and philosophic naturalist. 



In examining briefly some of the points brought forward by 

 Darwin in support of his theory of the origin of species by means 

 of what he calls " Natural Selection," one of the aims of this 

 theory may be better understood by quoting the words used by a 

 distinguished man of science, who put the saying of Lucretius 

 in the mouth of a curious speculator or Darwinian interrogating 

 a palaeontologist. " You have," he says, " abandoned the belief 

 in one primaeval creation at one point of time ; you cannot 

 assert that an Elephant existed when the first saurians roamed 

 over earth and water. Without, then, in any way limiting 

 Almighty power, if an Elephant were created without progenitors, 

 the first Elephant must, in some way or other, have arrived 

 physically on this earth. Whence did he come ? Did he fall from 

 the sky (i. e. the interplanetary space) ? Did he rise moulded out 

 of an amorphous mass of earth or rock ? Did he appear out of 

 the cleft of a tree ? If he had no antecedent progenitors, some 

 such beginning must be assigned to him." Darwin and his 

 followers assert that such an Elephant must have had ancestors. 



[To-day the Darwinian might point to the discovery — in the 

 Upper Eocene of the desert-region near the former Lake Meris — 

 of an apparent ancestor of the Elephant, somewhat pig-like and 

 smaller than a Horse, and to which the name Meritherium has 

 been given by Andrews, its discoverer. Further, that a series of 

 forms with long jaws from the same Fayum (or desert-region) of 

 Egypt, as well as the Tetrabelodon of the Miocene of France, lead 

 to the condition in the American Mastodon in which the jaws 

 are considerably shortened ; and finally to the still shorter jaws 

 of the modern Elephant with its " bull-dog" skull (Lankester).] 



Darwin's whole theory being based on the mutability (adapta- 

 bility) of species, and their derivation or development from 



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