248 
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 argtiing 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 sufiiciently 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 chai'acter, 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 theo^^y 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 wiU 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, wiU he, by way of proving its sufiiciency, 
give us, instead, the history ef a single species and exhibit, by facts its " develop- 
ment from some other ? If the " Darw inian" 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 attertion 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 natm-e 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 Hving 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 vneld the powers of nature ? In all these things, and 
in a thousand others, the brute is as powerless and insignificant as the man is 
mighty and all-controUing, and yet in the face of all there are those who, with 
audacity equalled only by their humility, would Hnk themselves by a bond of 
identity with the brute, and make their lofty and god-like intellect the transmuted 
