OMPHALOS. 
107 
The one idea on which Mr. Gosse’s book is founded is an obvious 
one, which has been alluded to by others, and must have occurred to 
most men who thought on the subject at all, but never appeared to any 
one before worth the trouble of elaboration. 
The idea is simply this,—a newly created organic being, or pair of 
beings, must, so far as we can see, have been essentially the same as all 
its or their descendants, and, therefore, each must have had all the 
marks of being itself the descendant of a parent; and at whatever stage 
of life each was brought into existence, it must have been just like all 
its descendants in the same stage, and must, therefore, have appeared to 
have already passed through the stages of life previous to that one. Mr. 
Gosse, accordingly, takes upon himself to imagine that he and another 
person actually meet with a number of newly created animals and plants, 
and after detailing to this other person all the evidence of growth and 
previous existence, and descent from parents, to be found in these indi¬ 
viduals, comes down upon him with the assurance in each case that the 
evidence is entirely false, for that, from private information of his own 
(he does not say how obtained, or obtainable), he knows that the indi¬ 
vidual in question has been only that instant created. 
This ridiculous statement is repeated over and over again for twenty 
or thirty species of plants and animals, ending with man and his navel. 
This repetition reminded me irresistibly of a comic song I recollect to have 
heard at Cambridge supper-parties some five and twenty years ago, the 
joke of which (not a very brilliant one) consisted in detailing all kinds 
of anachronisms and absurdities, such as Wat Tyler stabbing Julius 
Caesar, &c., and then very unnecessarily assuring us the thing was im¬ 
possible. Guy Fawkes, I think, came over Waterloo Bridge— 
“ To perpetrate his guilt, sir, 
That is to say he would have done, hut a little thing prevented him, 
He couldn’t come that way, you know, for the Bridge it wasn’t built, sir.” 
If Mr. Gosse’s book were really worthy of serious and detailed refu¬ 
tation, we might pause, I think, here for a moment to consider whether 
it be not a piece of unwarrantable presumption, and something very 
nearly approaching to that impious irruption of certain persons “ where 
angels fear to tread,” for any one to treat the awe-inspiring mystery of 
direct creation with the flippant familiarity which Mr. Gosse ventures 
upon. To a man of a really serious and religious tone of mind, this 
treatment is far more repulsive than that even of the author of the 
“ Yestiges of Creation,” and the Lamarckian School. Both classes of 
reasons appeal to our ignorance rather than our knowledge, and take upon 
themselves to make positive assertions upon things about which no man 
knows, perhaps no man ever shall or can know, anything whatever; but 
the soi-disant religious school to which Mr. Gosse belongs has the addi¬ 
tional bad taste to speak as if they, forsooth, were on the most intimate 
terms with the Creator of all things, and were enabled by private favour 
to speak confidently and authoritatively on all those secrets and mysteries 
on which a reverent man only ponders silently in his most solemn and 
meditative moods. 
