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accounts for the facts of nature which are brought before us. The great 
reason on which it seems to rest is, that if you take all the various forms of 
animal life, whether vegetable or animal, they seem to progress upwards 
from forms of extreme simplicity, gradually increasing in complexity until 
they come to the highest forms in the vegetable or in the animal world. 
When the science of classification was in its infancy, it seemed to be clear to 
men that they could make such a system as would give 'them a very philo- 
sophical mode of tabulating or classifying or arranging all the forms in 
nature ; but I believe that when that is examined with some degree of 
accuracy it is not found to fit nature at all. We have not yet arrived at, 
and I think we are at a great distance from, any really good natural non- 
artificial system of classifying either plants or animals. On the contrary, we 
find that, instead of their being capable, as we supposed, of arrangement in 
one progressive line, ranging up from the simplest to the most complicated, 
they rather seem to be formed in circles, and not in lines ; and some 
have proposed a circular arrangement into groups ; but they have found the 
greatest difficulty when they have attempted to arrange them according to 
any law of progression whatever. But suppose you could so arrange them ; 
it is supposed, according to this law of development, that all the more com- 
plicated forms have arisen by successive variations from simpler and less 
complicated forms. But those who maintain this theory have been unable 
to give us any proof whatever from the history of the beings of this world, or 
from the conditions under which they are placed, in support of such a theory. 
We find that all the most ardent supporters of this theory are unable to do 
so. When Darwin is asked to produce all those variations and changes, and 
to show when they took place, he confesses that they are not yet found. 
Even with his geological theories of extensive past ages, he cannot, in any 
stratum of rocks, find evidence in support of his theory, and therefore he tells 
us that they must yet be found in unknown and undiscovered strata of the 
earth ! He says the proof will come hereafter, 'but for the present he does 
not bring a single atom of proof to show that his theory has been at work. If 
his theory were a true one, there would be evidence of this progression going 
on now, and it would have to be shown when, in history or in man’s knowledge, 
the first steps really took place, and the inspiration of life went into inorganic 
elements. That difficulty was felt, and is still felt, by all the Continental 
advocates of the theory of evolution. It was felt by the author of The 
Vestiges of Creation , and he endeavoured as well as he could to establish the 
theory of spontaneous generation. W e find, that all the men on the Continent 
who want to set forth this theory are striving as much as they can to produce 
something like a proof of the possibility of spontaneous generation. But has 
that theory been proved ? The facts on which the author oi The Vestiges of 
Creation triumphantly relied have been found to be no lacts a ai and have 
been entirely refuted. We sometimes hear that some one in Germany has 
discovered this or that, but we never have these animated molecules brought 
before us ; and the more we go into the matter, the more a close investigation 
puts the theory of spontaneous generation further and further out of the 
