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our Great Creator some men have rushed desperately to con- 
clusions, unworthy of true science, dishonouring to our 
Almighty Maker, and at variance with common sense. 
27. The philosopher Lamarck and his more modern disciples 
in the Darwinian school of thought, undertake to account 
for the origin of things in Nature. Setting aside the plain 
statements of the Bible, which represent God not only as 
the Great Creator, but as the eternal Distributor of all things, 
they tell us that the laws of Nature are in themselves executive, 
wholly irrespective of the Almighty, except, perhaps, in the 
creation of the original plasm. The Divine Being is thus 
excluded from His works, and this, I need hardly say, re- 
duces Him to a kind of moral nonentity ! Thus the Creator 
(if even acknowledged to be such) is placed in solitary grandeur, 
according to the philosophy of Epicurus, looking down as it 
were at the progressive development of His plan, from the 
potentially endowed plasm in the far, far distant past, till it 
assumes, after countless and ill-shapen transmutations, His 
own Divine image and likeness ! This theory runs directly 
counter to the principle of unity of design, traceable in all 
the works of God. It is, in fact, the deification of Matter. 
28. But let us apply the principles to a particular case. 
Lamarck endeavours to account for the extreme length of 
the neck of the giraffe, from the fact that it is a creature of cir- 
cumstances. He tells us (how far back he does not say) that 
originally the length of its neck was not greater than that of 
the elephant. But the giraffe having to obtain its subsistence 
from the leaves of trees, high up out of ordinary reach, 
saw indeed the tempting morsel but knew not how to seize 
it. It was this that suggested to the animal a series of vi- 
gorous and well-directed jerks, until in time the vertebrae 
became gradually extended. Each succeeding race of giraffes 
left to its immediate posterity a legacy of elongation, till in 
the lapse of ages we find this creature of circumstances the 
architect of its own fortunes. 
29. In like manner it is said that water-fowl originally were 
not endowed with web feet. They were like the common hen, 
but being creatures of circumstances, and having to seek their 
food among the reedy banks of lakes and ponds, the instinct 
of self-preservation evolved those necessary movements of the 
feet and legs, which in process of time terminated in the 
production of web. Now there is not a single particle of 
proof for all this. It is based simply on conjecture, and we 
are asked to accept it as the best conceived idea of the origin 
of the present state of things in the world around us, so far as 
it relates to the analogy between plan and form. 
