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The theory is one which relies to some extent expressly on 
“ unknown agencies,” and is absolutely unsatisfactory as an 
explanation of difficulties it seeks to solve. “ If the theory 
of development can be shown to involve difficulties of con- 
ception which are quite as great as those which it professes to 
remove, then it ceases to have any standing ground at all ; for 
an hypothesis which, to avoid an alternative supposed to be 
inconceivable, adopts another alternative encompassed by many 
difficulties quite as great, is not entitled even to provisional 
acceptance.” Wallace, although advocating the doctrine itself, 
argues that it is not applicable to man, and that it cannot ac- 
count for his physical organisation, his mental powers, and 
moral nature. Huxley, whilst undertaking to show that the 
anatomical differences between man and the chimpanzee are 
not such in kind or degree as to justify their classification in 
separate orders, does this, however, on the condition that he 
may omit mind from his phenomena, admitting that, if this be 
taken into account, then the difference is so wide that it cannot 
be measured, an enormous gulf, and thus practically gives up 
the question. By German men of science of the first rank 
the theory has been pronounced to consist of “bold flights 
and arbitrary assertions.” By Agassiz it has been said that 
“ the theory is a scientific blunder, untrue in its facts, un- 
scientific in its method, and ruinous in its tendency.” “ Every- 
where,” says Professor Phillips, “ we are required to look 
somewhere else by the hypothesis ; which may fairly be inter- 
preted to signify that the hypothesis everywhere fails in the 
first and most important step. How is it conceivable that the 
second stage should be everywhere preserved, but the first 
nowhere ? ” The mind revolts against the theory when once 
it has been fully considered. There would be something 
grotesque, were it not painfully saddening, in that ingenuity 
which proposes to fill the gap which exists between the higher 
religious and moral sentiments of man and the instinctive 
affections of the brutes by that miserable ape, which, when 
crossed in love or when pining in cold or hunger, is imagined 
by Lubbock to have conceived for the first time in its poor 
addled pate the dread of evil to come, and so became the 
father of theology. Between man and the brutes there is a 
great gulf fixed, one which seems, however, to swallow up all 
those who seek to cross it by theories of their own. It is only 
when we rise on the wings of faith and accept the teachings 
of the Word of Truth that we rise to nobler themes, and an 
all-sufficient Cause, as we tell our descent, and add, “which 
was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.” It is no 
legend, but the grand old revelation of Genesis that satisfies 
