78 REV. A. IRVING^ B.A., D.SC, ON EVOLUTIONARY LAW 



These are what we may call the W\yqq primary factors oi what 

 constitutes the order of nature in the fullest and most compre- 

 hensive sense. It is true ^^^hat the author does not apply the 

 term " living " formally to the vegetable kingdom, though he 

 implies it in his description of the more prominent life-functions 

 observable in that department of nature. Nor does he date 

 back the appearance of life upon this planet to the early stage 

 of its evolution, to which the revelations of Science carry us. 

 Why should he ? Who could have understood him, had he 

 done so ? 



In the second place the author, whoever he may have been, 

 seems to recognise directive intelligence guiding the powers 

 inherent in nature along definite lines, in his frequent use of 

 the expression — " God. said'' as introductory to his description 

 of each broad and general ^A/ise of the manifestation of creative 

 power, as it presented itself to his mind. This very expression 

 used for marking otf each such phase of what we may speak of 

 as " the things that are made," seems to have been intentionally 

 used to exclude the notion of the crude " carpenter theory," 

 jupon demolishing which Herbert Spencer has expended a 

 considerable amount of second-rate ammunition. It was a 

 " bogey " to the mind of no really educated man, nor to any real 

 student of Science. 



How life first came into play in the earliest Protista^ of the 

 warm waters of the Cambrian or Pre-Cambrian ocean we know 

 not.* Haeckel has so long persuaded himself that he knows, 

 that he speaks of abiogenesis almost as a scientific truth, 

 although it is only a scientific belief, which through " unconscious 

 cerebration " seems to affect the colour and perspective of all 

 his ideas. It is not likely in the nature of things that we could 

 have structural forms preserved in the fossil state of either the 

 earliest protozoa or the earliest alga^. or fungi, though the graphite 

 and anthracite of the Cambrian and Silurian stratified rocks 

 have been probably ascribed rightly to the mineralisation of 

 marine algiT. But all tliat is outside the intellectual vision of 

 the author of the Creation Story, as is also the iauna of the 

 palaeozoic ocean ; nor ought we to expect him to have antici- 

 pated the results of the science of palaeontology, which is only 



" The mystery of life remains as impenetrable as ever, and in his 

 evolutionary speculations the biologist does not attempt to exj^lain life 

 itself, but adopting as his unit tlie animal (.sv. organism) as a whole, 

 discusses its relationshi]) to others and to the siurouiiding conditions." 

 (Prof. Sir G. H. JJarwin, F.E.S., Presidential Address, Brit. Assn., Cape 

 Town Meeting, 1905.) 



