108 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
To return, however, to the argument: Mr. Gosse having, by begging 
the question, established the inconclusiveness of the evidence derived 
from the structure of all these freshly created species that he so conve¬ 
niently and so very improbably happens to stumble upon, makes then a 
most tremendous jump, and after a vigorous pirouette in the air, alights 
upon the ground that the whole earth was created after the same fashion 
as these hypothetical individuals, bearing, that is, within itself all the 
marks of having passed through many previous stages of existence, those 
marks being created in it at the very moment of its coming into ex¬ 
istence. He does not go on to complete what he calls his circle, and say 
that the earth hears internal evidence of descent from a pre-existent 
parent, and is likely to produce young worlds, an omission which, for 
the sake of his own argument (to say nothing of the amusement of his 
readers), is to he regretted, inasmuch as it makes his construction rather 
top-sided, and renders a great part of his previous data unnecessary. 
But how does he make this jump, or rather, how does he try to cover and 
conceal this great gap of a “non-sequitur” in the chain of his reasoning ? 
Simply, by the old device of vapouring about with a —“ Who will dare 
to deny it?” “ Who will say that the suggestion, that the strata of the 
surface of the earth, with their fossil Floras and Faunas, may possibly belong 
to a prochronic development of the mighty plan of the life-history of this 
world; who will dare to say that such a suggestion is a self-evident ab¬ 
surdity ?” 
It may he over-hold of me, but I certainly do venture to deny that 
the earth is an organic being, or is at all analogous to an organic being. 
Instead of blustering and daring any one to deny it, it was incumbent 
on Mr. Gosse to prove, or to render probable, or at least to give some 
reason for supposing it likely, that the earth could not have been created 
without hearing marks in its internal structure such as would have been 
produced by its having passed through several stages of existence. 
We cannot conceive the existence of an organic being that has not 
organic structure, capable of performing the organic functions that are 
necessary for the continuance of its existence, and having performed 
those necessary for its past existence, and for elaboration of those parts 
of its structure which are the results of those functions. For a newly 
created organic being to be like its descendants, or capable of having 
any, it must itself, apparently, have all these characters. Is there any 
such necessity in the case of an inorganic world ? “ Will any one dare 
to say” (to adopt Mr. Gosse’s phraseology) “that the world could not 
have been created without hearing such internal evidence of pre-exis¬ 
tence at the moment of creation?” To render his argument worth the 
paper it was written on, Mr. Gosse must maintain this position, and sup¬ 
port it with some show, at least, of reasoning, and not with a mere dar¬ 
ing of anybody to deny it. 
Let us throw Mr. Gosse’s reasoning into a syllogistic form as the best 
method of testing its logic :— 
First syllogism :—- 
