7 28 
An Exegesis of Darwinism. 
[December, 
Darwin offer us the alternative of a plurality ? and further 
specify “ only four or five progenitors ” for animals ? He 
writes : — “ If at the first commencement of life many dif- 
ferent forms were evolved, ... we may conclude that only 
a very few have left modified descendants. For as I have 
recently remarked in regard to the members of each great 
kingdom, such as the Vertebrata, Articulata, &c., we have 
distinct evidence in their embryological, homologous, and 
rudimentary structures, that within each kingdom all the 
members are descended from a single progenitor (p. 425). 
Again, certainly we ought not “to believe that innumerable 
beings within each great class * have been created with plain, 
but deceptive, marks of descent from a single parent ” (p. 423). 
“ But as the members of quite distinct classes have some- 
thing in common in structure, and much in common in 
function, analogy would lead us one step farther, and to infer 
as probable that all living beings are descended from a single 
prototype ” (i., 13) ; a comparatively precipitous “ one step.” 
In the first edition of the “ Origin of Species ” we were in- 
formed that “ at the most remote geological period, the 
Earth may have been as well peopled with many species of 
many genera, families, orders, and classes, as at the present 
day ” (p. 126 ; cf. 6 ed., p. 97). 
4. “ Mr. Darwin does not inform us whether he believes 
the Creator made the original progenitor of all living beings, 
and then breathed into it the breath of life, or whether it 
was produced spontaneously without life, and then life was 
breathed into it. If the former, then we have the Creator 
making, breathing into, and dropping into the water, the 
lonely protozoic Adam, that is to be ‘ the father of all living,’ 
a microscopic gelatinous globule, the single tenant of a 
boundless ocean.” (See, however, p. 422, and ed. i., 466. 
Cf. ed. 6, 410, and i., 12, which seem to imply literal 
creation. 
5. See last sentence of “ Origin of Species,” which is not 
only “ so distinctly anthropomorphic,” but somewhat theo- 
logical. Mr. Charles C. Cattell, secretary of the Darwin 
Institute, Birmingham, shall speak on this matter. “ The 
early works of Darwin contain a phrase, ‘ Life breathed 
by a Creator into a few forms,’ and Moses says of Adam, 
‘ God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.’ On this 
slender foundation is built the immense superstructure that 
Darwin and Moses are in agreement.” 
The previous collation of passages concerning the nature 
* The italics are mine throughout unless otherwise specified. 
