228 
ancestry, not only through some series of improving apes 
even some myriads of ages back to some zoophyte ! Even 
here I am not to stop, hut must conceive that this zoophyte 
attained its life by some accidental chemical combination of 
taTmatterf And, when I ask for the origin of this matter, 
I am not allowed to attribute even its formation to creation, 
Lt must wait till “philosophy” can discover ^me less myste- 
rious or non-miraculous origin for it ! Hence a* lajtf M 1 
am led back only to an unreasoning dislike of the miraculous 
and the mysterious. But will this extravagant, monstrous 
hvnothesis ^for which nothing like demonstration can be urged 
thw hypothesis, which, while it attempts to evade, does not 
accountfor one of the teeming mysteries by which we are 
surrounded explain how life, that mysterious, undeflnable 
tW was communicated to the matter of the zoophyte ? 
Matter cannot multiply or increase itself one single 
Yet th hypothesis which would derive man or an elephant 
from the primeval zoophyte makes me maintain the mystery 
orThe mhacle, call it which you please that the chance combi- 
nation of certain material elements produced a new power, the 
power of life, capable under certain circumstances of forcing 
matter to reproduce this form, ad infinitum. Nay, “°[ e 
“his that one such combination was the commencement of aU 
those marvellous structures which evince so much de g , 
without one particle of design being ever e«rted by nny 
intelligent agent ! Is this, or is it not, the more monstrous 
hypothesis Am I to be laughed out of my faith by ridicule, 
bya free translation of the Epicurean poet Lucretius . 
“ You have abandoned the belief in one primeval P " 
time - you cannot assert that an elephant existed when the first saunans 
roamed^ over earth and water. Without, then, in any way hmiting Almighty 
power if an elephant were created without progenitors, the first ekphant 
must ’ in some way or other, have physically arrived on this earth. W hen ? 
did he come ? did he fall from the sky, (ie from the SP p j ar 
did he rise moulded out of a mass of amorphous earthor rock . did PP 
Z. of the cleft of a tree ? If he had no antecedent progenitors, some such 
beginning must be assigned to him.” 
Though the point of this satire is levelled against those 
palaeontoloirists who, till lately, maintained a succession of 
widely separated creations, I may ask does not this^free trans- 
lation like the original, satirize every creative act . 1 
as ajpbcable to the creation of a zoophyte as to that of a 
“ Can Mr. Grove prove that elephants were not 
with the first saurians that ever roamed over earth and wate . 
