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THE GEOLOGIST. 



readiest arguments against observed facts, its operation is so exceedingly slow 

 and intermittant that it is removed altogether from the range of correct observa- 

 tion, and its verification rendered impossible ; but, also, its direct effect would be 

 to shut the Creator out of the world of his own creation, and to set up instead 

 what the Rev. Baden Powell calls " the self-evolving powers of nature." 



In arguing this theory Mr. Hutton gives a list of twenty- six " reasons for 

 supposing that variation is at present unlimited," and says that " he knows of no 

 answers to them." He may know of no answers to these arguments ; but I don't 

 think it would be very difficult to supply satisfactory answers to most, if not all 

 of them, without having recourse to the " Darwinian" theory, and I have no 

 doubt but that most of your readers have already done so to their own satisfac- 

 tion. Whether or not, to bring forward a number of isolated statements, many 

 of them sufficiently hypothetical, and make them decisive of the question is simply 

 absurd. With greater propriety might those who maintain the constancy of species 

 produce a number of statements of an opposite character, and claim that they 

 shall decide the question. 



Again, Mr. Hutton professes to have answered the principal objections to the 

 " Darwinian" theory : will he find answers to the following, which I give by 

 way of example ? If the Darwinian theory be true, then for long ages before the 

 deposition of the lowest Silurian strata the world must have swarmed with 

 living creatures (Darwin, " On the Origin of Species," page 307). What have 

 become of the " records of these vast primordial periods ?" If acquired organs are 

 obtained gradually, how is it then that no specimen in the transition state has ever 

 been found ? What will he say to the statement of Professor Owen (Classification 

 of Mammals, appendix xiii, on the " Orang, Chimpanzee, and Gorilla, with reference 

 to the Transmutation of Species"), that "no known cause of change productive of 

 the varieties of mammalian species could operate in altering the size, the shape, 

 or the connections of the premaxillary bones, which so remarkably distinguish the 

 Troglochytes gorilla not from man only, but from all other anthropoid apes" ? 

 This single statement is weighty enough to decide the whole question, if any 

 statement could decide a theory so tenacious of life ; and lastly, his theory professes 

 to explain the history of all creation, will he, by way of proving its sufficiency, 

 give us, instead, the history ef a single species and exhibit, by facts its " develop- 

 ment from some other ? If the " Darwinian" theory can do this it will then be 

 time enough to receive it as a true physical law ; but if it cannot, then it is a 

 mere dream, and unworthy of the serious attention of the true student of nature. 



But leaving this line of argument, which has been gone over again and again 

 only to be again and again disregarded by the transmutationists ; and which, after 

 all, is not adequate to decide a question which deals with a compound nature such 

 as that of man. I now turn to another which ought to receive a due consideration 

 in every fair discussion of this theory : I mean the argument derived from the 

 mental and moral powers of man ; and in this argument I restrict myself, for the 

 sake of brevity and simplicity of detail, to a single example ; but it must be borne 

 in mind that one part of the argument, at least, is equally applicable to every other 

 species of living beings. 



The unity of .the human species is demonstrated by the constancy of certain 

 osteological and dental characteristics; but he is less characterized by these 

 physical peculiarities than by his mental and moral characteristics. Compare the 

 gigantic grasp of his intellect with the feeble and uncertain mental powers 

 of the most sagacious of the inferior creatures — what analogy is there between 

 them that we should infer the one to be a " development" of the other ? Can the 

 " sagacious" brute explore the depths of space, and weigh as in a balance the 

 ponderous orbs of heaven ? Can he dig into the bowels of the earth and drag out 

 from thence the buried records of ages, vast as the spaces about him ? Can he 

 control the elements, and wield the powers of nature ? In all these things, and 

 to a thousand others, the brute is as powerless and insignificant as the man is 

 mighty and all-controlling, and yet in the face of all there are those who, with 

 audacity cquallod only by their humility, would link themselves by a bond of 

 identity with the brute, and make their lofty and god-like intellect the transmuted 



