55 
monogenism, as if it were an established truth, and believe it. 
I do not ; and I am not acquainted with any man of science 
or duly instructed person who does.-” Now, why does Professor 
uxley reject this doctrine ? Is it because the sciences of physi- 
ology and comparative anatomy, which he has cultivated with 
such success, and with such deserved distinction, compel him to 
reject the theory of the descent of the human race from a single 
pair ^ No. He admits that science presents him with no diffi- 
culty m accepting this doctrine. What is it, then, he rejects ? 
Man s creation. And why ? Because he considers it unphilo- 
sophical to admit the idea of creation; aud he thinks Mr. 
Darwin s law of the origin of species enables him to evade 
this unphilosophical idea. “ The whole tendency,” he asserts, 
o modern science is to thrust the origination of things 
further and further into the background; and the chief philo- 
sophical objection to Adam being, not his oneness, but the 
hypothesis of his ^ special creation; the multiplication of that 
objection tenfold is, whatever it may look, an increase, instead 
of a diminution, of the difficulties of the case. And as to the 
second alternative, it may safely be affirmed that, even if the 
differences between men are specific, they are so small that 
the assumption of more than one primitive stock for all is 
altogether superfluous. Surely no one can now be found to 
assert that any two stocks of mankind differ as much as a 
chimpanzee and an orang do; still less that they are as unlike 
as either of these is to any New World Simian ? Lastly, the 
granting of the polvgenist premises does not, in the slightest 
degree, necessitate the polvgenist conclusion. Admit that 
JNegroes and Australians, Negritos and Mongols are distinct 
species, 01 distinct genera, if you will, and you may yet, with 
per ect consistency, be the strictest of monogenists, and even 
believe m Adam and Eve as the primeval parents of mankind. 
It is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery ; it is he who 
coming forward in the guise of an eclectic philosopher, presents 
is doctrine as the key to ethnology, and as reconciling and 
combining all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic 
schools. It is true that Mr. Darwin has not, in so many words 
applied his views to ethnology ; but even he who f runs and 
reads, the f Origin of Species 9 can hardly fail to do so.” 
It is by such loose, illogical, unphilosophical reasoning, such 
acceptation of crude hypotheses as demonstrated laws, that we 
are to accept the /‘'chain of endless causation” as eliminatino- 
even the idea of creation and a Creator from the universe. But 
this will appear more strongly still if we pass from the origin 
of vitality on the earth to the origin of the world itself by the 
self- evolving powers of nature. This leads us up at once to 
