98 PARTICULAR CONSIDERATIONS ON THE 



was, or at the best interpreted in a thousand wrong ways 

 in conformity with ideas already familiar. The experi- 

 ments above described, finding a public mind which had 

 never discovered a fact or conceived an idea at all analo- 

 gous, were, of course, ungraciously received. It was 

 held to be impious, even to surmise that animals could 

 have been formed through any instrumentality of an appa- 

 ratus devised by human skill. The more likely account 

 of the phenomena was said to be, that the insects were 

 only developed from ova, resting either in the fluid, or in 

 the wooden frame on which the experiments took place. 

 On these objections the following remarks may be made. 

 The supposition of impiety arises from an entire miscon- 

 ception of what is implied by an aboriginal creation of 

 insects. The experimentalist could never be considered 

 as the author of the existence of these creatures, except 

 by the most unreasoning ignorance. The utmost that can 

 be claimed for, or imputed to him, is, that he arranged 

 the natural conditions under which the true creative 

 energy — that of the Divine Author of all things — was 

 pleased to work in that instance. On the hypothesis here 

 brought forward, the acarus Crossii was a type of being 

 ordained from the beginning, and destined to be realized 

 under certain physical conditions. When a human hand 

 brought these conditions into the proper arrangement, it 

 did an act akin to hundreds of familiar ones which we 

 execute every day, and which are followed by natural re- 

 sults; but it did nothing more. The production of the 

 insect if it did take place as assumed, was as clearly an 

 act of the Almighty himself, as if he had fashioned it 

 with hands. For the presumption that an act of aborigi- 

 nal creation did tak%)lace, there is this to be said that, in 

 Mr. Weekes's experiment, every care that ingenuity could 

 devise was taken to exclude the possibility of a develop- 

 ment of the insects from ova. "The wood of the frame 

 was baked in a powerful heat ; a bell-shaped glass cover- 

 ed the apparatus, and from this the atmosphere was ex- 

 cluded by the constantly rising fumes from the liquid, for 

 the emission of which there was an aperture so arranged 

 at the top of the glass, that only these fumes could pass. 

 The water was distilled, and the substance of the silicate 

 had been subjected to white heat. „ Thus every source oi 

 fallacy seemed to be shut up. In such circumstances, a 

 candid mind, which sees nothing either impious or unphi- 



