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Palaeontologists hare abandoned their theory, because now 
there is evidence that creatures supposed to be members of 
successive creations have been contemporary, and, in reality 
members of the same creation. Is it not more consonant with 
u 7? 0 , WI1 facts of g eol °g3b that the elephant and saurians 
should have been co-existent, than to suppose the saurian 
transmuted by the "law of continuity” into an elephant ? Where 
are we to look for the successive steps of this process, not 
only from the saurian upwards, but further back still, from 
the zoophyte? We have now the admission that the records 
ot geology, the records of the rocks and strata of the earth 
anord no such evidence ; and since we may look in vain for 
the production of a mammal or saurian by the naked eye we 
are taught to look for the first step in the creative process of 
liie by tne aid of the microscope ! 
As we detect no such phenomenon as the creation or spontaneous 
generation of vegetables and animals which are large enough for the eye to 
see without instrumental assistance ; as we have long ceased to expect to find 
a Plesiosaurus spontaneously generated in our fishpond, or a Pterodactyle in 
our pheasant-cover, the field of this class of research has become iden- 
tified with the field of the microscope, and at each new phase the investi- 
gation has passed from a larger to a smaller class of organisms. The question 
whether among the smallest, and apparently the most elementary forms of 
organic life the phenomenon of spontaneous generation obtains, has recently 
formed the subject of careful experiment and animated discussion in France. 
If it could be found that organisms of a complex character were generated 
without progenitors out of amorphous matter, it might reasonably be argued 
that a similar mode of creation might obtain in regard to larger organisms. 
Although we see no such phenomenon as the formation of an animal such as 
an elephant, or a tree such as an oak, excepting from a parent which resem- 
bles it, yet if the microscope revealed to us organisms, smaller but equally 
complex, so formed without having been reproduced, it would render it not 
improbable that such might have been the case with larger organic beings.” 
Yet, after all these sage remarks, Mr. Grove confesses that 
the balance of experiment and. opinion is against the spon- 
taneous .generation of even the simplest form of organism ! 
. In 7 ain do I look for the grand Baconian system of induc- 
tion, m arriving at the hypothesis which would substitute the 
spontaneous generation of a zoophyte, and the development 
of a zoophyte into an elephant, for the creation of the elephant 
at once by the fiat of the Almighty, perfect in form, and with 
every organ of its body, evidencing the wisdom of its designer 
fit for the wants of the animal. I meet no array of facts fnex- 
licable on any other hypothesis. No evidence of the com- 
