TENDENCY OF THE NEW DOCTRINE. 289 



against a new and equally unfriended stranger, is if such 

 were the best means of purchasing impunity for them- 

 selves. I trust that a little time will enable the public to 

 penetrate this policy, and als > the real bearing of all such 

 objections. They must soon see that, if a literal inter- 

 pretation of Scripture is an insufficient argument against 

 the true geognostic history of our earth, so also must it be 

 against all associated phenomena, supposing they are pre- 

 sented on good evidence. 



" Some persons," says one of my reviewers, 64 have a 

 vague idea that there is something derogatory in the low- 

 est form of animal life to have its origin in merely inor- 

 ganic elements ; an idea which results, perhaps, not so 

 much from any subtle and elevated conceptions of life as 

 from an imagination unawakened to the dignity and the 

 marvel of the inorganic world. What is motion but a 

 sort of life 1 a life of activity, if not of feeling. Sup- 

 pose — what, indeed, nowhere exists — an inert matter, 

 and let it be suddenly endowed with motion, so that two 

 particles should fly towards each other from the utmost 

 bounds of the universe ; were not this almost as strange 

 a property as that which endows an irritable tissue, or an 

 organ of secretion ? Is not the world one — the creature 

 of one God — dividing itself, with constant interchange 

 of parts, into the sentient and the non-sentient, in order, 

 so to speak, to become conscious of itself ? Are we to 

 place a great chasm between the sentient and the non- 

 sentient, so that it shall be derogation to a poor worm to 

 have no higher genealogy than the elen ent which is the 

 lightning of heaven, and too much honor to the subtle 

 chemistry of the earth, to be the father of a crawling 

 subject of some bag, or sack, or imperceptible globule 

 of animal life. No : we have no recoil against this gen- 

 eration of an animalcule by the wonderful chemistry of 

 God; our objection to this doctrine is, that it is not 

 proved."* 



As one example of the weakness of the opposition pre- 

 sented by the Edinburgh reviewer on this ground, I may 

 quote a passage in which he has also aimed at convicting 

 me of being enamored of resemblances, and allowing my 

 senses to be cheated by empty sounds. " Every one," 

 says he, " has heard of the quickness of thought, and who 

 has no': heard of the velocity of the galvanic fluic. ? There- 

 * Blackwood's Magazine, April, 1845 



