196 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
of life in one grand series of cause and effect ; the result of count- 
less myriads of ages, reaching far back to an indefinitely extended 
past. But the links are unconnected, and the chain is therefore still 
unmade. 
As to the real existence of that chain, all are agreed. The older 
philosophy teaches that the links are forged together by a distinct 
act of the Creator’s will; the Evolutionist seeks to find it, and has 
yet to find it, in some law of causation acting on the links and 
growing out of them; each link evolved from that which went 
before, to produce in turn another link, a step higher in the scale 
of Being. 
Granting, however, that the conclusion reached by the new 
philosophy were less of an assumption than we are compelled to 
think it is; granting that all that Dr. Thompson desires to find, 
and thinks he ought to find, were found—so that from the Ascidian, 
a creature without sense or motion, almost a plant, up to the Lion, 
the highest development of activity and strength; or the Elephant, 
the fullest development of size; or the Dog, the most perfect de- 
velopment of sagacity; the chain of connection could be distinctly 
traced link by link without obscurity or doubt; granting all this— 
there are still two awkward breaks in the chain which it seems 
impossible to unite ; one allowed in so many words to be so by Dr. 
Thompson, the other, though not yet fairly faced, equally impractic- 
able to any means that the embryologist can command. I mean, 
The origin of Life; and 
The origin of Speech. 
Evolution, as a scientific theory of creation, must apply of course 
to all, and not simply to some part of our world. Those who accept 
it do not hesitate to allow this. There is no reason therefore, in 
tracing the development of life, why the enquiry should be stopped 
at any point short of the first origin of all things. There is no 
reason, for example, why our enquiry should stop at the Ascidian. 
Let it go still backwards; and if Evolution is true, we can go back 
and back through the lowest types of vegetable life, and from that 
to forms without life, until we reach the first elements—carbon, 
oxygen, hydrogen, and the like—which must be the true source 
and spring of all things, animate, inanimate, moral, mental, and 
physical. This would be a perfect theory of Cosmic Evolution : 
the atoms of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and what not, at one end 
of the series; living, speaking, thinking, immortal man at the 
