VESTIGES OF CREATIVE LAW. 



263 



merely with scoffs and jests, or at the most, certain wholly 

 gratuitous assumptions as to a possibly various cause, is 

 not philosophical, and therefore deserves no consideration. 



Having thus presented vestiges of laws for the origina- 

 tion and modification of organic being, I must protest 

 against proof of the existence of such laws being held in- 

 dispensable to the development theory. The earth, we 

 see, has been peopled for ages before man began to observe 

 nature or chronicle his observations. The organic world 

 attained what appears to us completeness, in remote ages. 

 It is a thing done, as individual reproduction is done at the 

 birth of the new creature. We are not, therefore, to ex- 

 pect conspicuous examples of either a new origin of life or 

 a modification of species at the present day. Though, 

 therefore, not one unequivocal instance of such origin and 

 such modification could be presented, it would say nothing 

 positive against the hypothesis that species originated, and 

 made a series of advances in general organization, by the 

 efficacy of law, in times long antecedent to our historical 

 period. We should still have to say that the evidence of 

 such phenomena was to be looked for elsewhere — namely, 

 in the history of the progress of organic being as chroni- 

 cled for us by geology, and in the history which physiology 

 affords us of the progress of the individual embryo. See- 

 ing, then, that plants and animals came into existence grad- 

 ually, in the course of a vast period of time, and in a 

 succession conforming generally to their grades in organi- 

 zation, and the stages through which the embryo of one of 

 the highest has to pass before it attains maturity, we might 

 say that we had seen all that could well be expected in 

 the case, and enough to establish a strong probability for 

 the development theory. Nevertheless, it may be admit- 

 ted that any evidence of the continued existence of the 

 creative and modifying laws is still desirable, for the sake 

 of corroboration. And such is the light in which I regard 

 the facts which we possess regarding variations of type, 

 and the production of some of the lower plants and animals 

 by means independent of generation. As in the progress 

 of an individual being, even after birth, we see the laws 

 which preside over reproduction operating still in a faint 

 degree in the defective nutrition which stunts, and the 

 favoring conditions which advance and glorify, the state 

 of infancy and youth, so might we expect that the laws 

 which originally spread the vegetable and animal king- 



