GRTNDLEY — THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 



249 



instinct of the brute 1 To maintain this strange position the first individuals of 

 the race are regarded as savages of the most degraded type in whom the boundary 

 fine between the man and brute is scarcely distinguishable, and an upward 

 progress is supposed, produced by the "struggle for life," in which, as generation 

 after generation passed away, the powers of the individual gradually increased 

 until, after the lapse of countless ages, they become what we find them now. 

 This, in brief, is the argument employed to support the " development" theory, 

 but unfortunately for its stability it is mere supposition, and the voice of science, 

 as well as the voice of revelation, gives us a far different account of the nature and 

 powers of original man. The arguments upon this point I need not produce 

 here, they are well known to everyone ; but they prove undeniably what the 

 Scriptures of Truth assert, that " man was made in the image of God" — that 

 " Adam, the father of mankind, was no squalid savage of doubtful humanity, but 

 a noble specimen of man ; and Eve a soft Circassian beauty, but exquisitely lovely 

 beyond the lot of fallen humanity." If, then, the "theory" fails on this point — 

 if it fails to establish a chain of " development" between man and the higher forma 

 of the brute creation — how can it expect to succeed in tracing the connexion lower 

 down in the scale of life ! If it cannot trace the sequence of the " development" 

 of the mammal into the man, how can it hope to show the faintest trace of the 

 development of the bird into the man ? or, still more hopeless task, of the mollusc 

 or crustacean of the Silurian deposits into the mammal or the man of the recent ! 

 And yet this is the theory in favour of which " after taking everything into con- 

 sideration," the balance of evidence greatly preponderates! 



But once more, conceding, for the sake of illustration, that the instinct of the 

 brute might be " developed" into the reason of the man : nay more, that the in- 

 complex form aud vegetative existence of the zoophyte might be " developed" into 

 the highly organized body and magnificent intellect of the man : wondrous 

 concession ! Conceding all this, I say what shall we say respecting the moral 

 powers of man ? Are they " developed" too ? And if so from what ? In many 

 of the inferior animals we may occasionally discover traces of an indistinct 

 reasoning power, in which the willing eye may perhaps see the " undeveloped" 

 intellect of man ; but where in the ape, or in any other earthly thing, shall we 

 find the faintest traces of that moral nature which so pre-eminently distinguishes 

 man from above every other creature, and which links his earthly nature with the 

 spiritual natures of heaven ? In the case of the intellect of man, the advocates of 

 the " Darwinian" theory may, with some little show of plausibility, point to feeble 

 glimmerings of reason which have Joeen observed in some of the lower animals, 

 and assert man's intellectual powers to be merely a " development" of theirs. 

 But if they cannot point to the possession of a moral nature beyond the pale of 

 humanity, then I contend that their whole theory fails, and that man, instead of 

 being merely a " development" of some previously existing creature is, in reality, 

 a new creation, and if one species is admitted to be an independant creation, and 

 not a " development" the whole theory breaks down ; for it becomes impossible, 

 the operation of this supposed law once broken, to fix its limits anew. The whole 

 theory smacks strongly of the unscientific and reprehensible scheme of bestowing 

 upon what they call the " self-evolving powers of nature," the prerogative of the 

 Deity, the power to create j so much so that the sooner it becomes a thing of the 

 past the better. 



I have this morning got my copy for this month (May), and I find that the 

 conclusion of Mr. Hutton's long and elaborate "notes" is almost entirely taken 

 up by an account of the imperfect condition of the geological records, with 

 the view of throwing upon this imperfection the onus of the fact that not a single 

 specimen of any species in the transition state has ever been found. Admitting 

 all he urges respecting the manifold imperfections of palaeontology, are these im- 

 perfections sufficient to account for the total absence of examples of what, if it 

 existed at all, must be considered as the great law of existence ? These breaks in 

 the geologic records might be sufficient to account for the rarity of these examples ; 

 but they do not account for their entire absence. How they can be made to furnish 

 an additional argument infa/vour of the " development" theory, I am certainly at a 

 VOL. IV. 2 D 



