GRTNDLEY THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 
249 
instinct of the brute ! To maintain this strange position the first individuals of 
the race are regarded as savages of the most degraded type in whom the boundary 
Hne 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 stabihty 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 squaHd 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 fomis 
of the brute creation — how can it expect to succeed in tracing the connexion lower 
do^vn 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 wliich " 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 and 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 shaU 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 hnks his earthly nature with the 
epiritual natures of heaven ? In the case of the intellect of man, the advocates of 
the " Darwinian" theory may, with some Httle show of plausibility, point to feeble 
glimmerings of reason which have been 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 preWousl'^ 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 theoiy 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 ; 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 suflBcient 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 accoimt for their entire absence. How they can be made to furnish 
an additional argument in /avour of the " development" theory, I am certainly at a 
VOL. IV. 2 D 
