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between science and religion depends on ignorance of one or the other, or 
on a dishonest and partial representation of the testimony of nature, or 
that of revelation, or of both. In those branches of natural science in 
which I myself work, it is the growing tendency of discovery to corroborate 
and elucidate the references to natural things in the Bible. This I have 
often had occasion to notice and comment upon in the discussion of scientific 
subjects. 
In so writing, however, I do not refer to the doctrine of spontaneous 
evolution of living beings, and of man, as held by a prominent school of 
German and English biologists. This doctrine I regard as equally at 
variance with science, revelation, and common sense, and destitute of any 
foundation in fact ; it belongs, in truth, to the region of those illogical 
paradoxes and loose speculations which have ever haunted the progress of 
knowledge, and have been dispelled only by increasing light. For this reason 
I have always refused to recognise the dreams of materialistic evolution* as 
of any scientific significance, or, indeed, as belonging to science at all. They 
bear no closer relation to science than fogs do to sunlight, and I anticipate a 
time not far distant when they will be dispelled, and when men will see 
much more clearly than they now do the agreement between the Word and 
the Works of God. 
February 28th, 1883. 
APPENDIX. 
The following remarks occur in the first article in Nature for June 28th, 
1883, which discussed some opposite views propounded in a recent work : 
“ A great deal has been written on the transformism-theory of Lamarck 
and Darwin, and it must be expected that much more will be written. One 
of the principal objections made to it is, that if man is really the descendant 
of the ape, and the ape that of other mammalia, if, generally, there exist 
links between all animals, living and extinct, so that all animals trace their 
origin to a common ancestor, how is it that no link really exists between 
man and ape, or between fish and frog, or between vertebrate and inverte- 
brate ? Embry ological considerations, it is said, show a real connexion 
between very different animals : a frog, for instance, is a fish for some time 
during its youth, and amphioxus looks very much like an ascidian. 
“ But, notwithstanding numerous arguments to support Lamarck’s theory, 
no transformist can show any species gradually losing its peculiar characters 
to acquire new ones belonging to another species, and thus transforming 
itself. However similar the dog may be to the wolf, no one has found any 
dead or living animal or skeleton which might as well be ascribed to wolf as 
to dog, and therefore be considered as being the link between the two. One 
may say exactly as much concerning the extinct species ; there is no gradual 
and imperceptible passage from one to another. Moreover, the first animals 
that lived on this earth are not, by any means, those that one may consider 
as inferior and degraded.” 
* The theory is a scientific blunder, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its 
method, and ruinous in its tendency. — Agassiz. 
