268 
may be descended from some one primordial form.” If we 
appeal to Darwin for man's direct descent, we are told that 
“ the first ancestors were ascidian tadpoles, themselves the 
parents of a group of fishes as lowly organised as the lancelet, 
and that from them have been evolved the new and the old 
world monkeys, and from the latter, at a remote period, man, 
the wonder and glory of the universe, proceeded.” One of 
Darwin's leading disciples as positively assigns the successive 
stages. Man was originally an oyster or clam, from which he 
has progressed to his present condition in the following way : 
— “ The oyster produced a tadpole which produced a quad- 
ruped which produced a baboon which produced an ourang- 
outang which produced a negro who produced a white man.*' 
For the possibility of such theories it will be well to remember 
that the advocates have not only to assume the existence of 
matter, but of life. Whence came that vital power which 
quickened into life that first primordial germ ? Exact natural 
science must confess not only her ignorance but her impotence 
to explain the origin of the first living organism from any of 
the natural forces with which she is acquainted. Liebig con- 
fidently said, “ Chemistry will never succeed in exhibiting in 
her laboratory a cell, a muscular fibre, a nerve — in a word, 
one of those really organic parts of an organism which are 
endowed with vital properties.” To what straits such advo- 
cates are driven it will be seen, when we remember how Sir 
William Thompson, as President of the British Association in 
1871, suggested that the seeds necessary to supply the vital life 
in plants might in the first instance have reached our earth by 
aerolites projected from some distant planet or other cosmical 
body. Such a solution would merely transfer the mystery, 
not explain it, and that so eminent a scientific investigator 
should frame such an hypothesis to lend a helping hand to 
Darwinian views is, as Professor Challis remarks, not only 
an evidence of weakness, but it shows also wherein the theory 
is weak. Let it further be borne in mind that the advocates 
of the views known as Darwinian have to assume the intervals 
of hundreds, if not thousands, of millions of years for these 
developments to have matured the present results we see 
around us. With the bank of eternity at command, all things 
seem possible to them. It is, however, one of the first fatal 
objections to such views that the time they require science 1 
itself cannot concede. 
If we take Sir William Thompson as our guide, we must 
limit the existence of our earth to one hundred million years. 
But, more recently still. Professor Tait, in his Recent Re- 
searches in Physical Science , speaking of the law of the | 
