on the perpetuation of the animals with their distinctive peculiarities of nature. All the rites, commands, and promises that relate to vegetable offerings and food, proceed likewise on it as a truth that they are for ever to continue to be of the same identical natures. Such are the great pledges to Adam and Eve of the herbs and fruits of the earth as food; to Noah and his family of an endless continuance of successive seasons, seedtimes and harvests; and such as the commands and promises to the Israelites in respect to their barley and other grain harvests, their olive, fig, and other fruit-bearing trees, and their vineyards.

It is indubitable, therefore, that the Most High has proceeded, and proceeds, in all the measures of his administration over the world, and especially in the work of redemption, on it as a certainty that man is to possess, through all his successive generations, identically the same nature as that of the first pair; and that all other living beings and vegetable forms are to transmit to their successors, from age to age, precisely the same nature as that which their originals received from the hand of the Creator.

And this great characteristic of the living natures of our world has been exemplified in all their history to the present time. They consist, now, of the same four great classes as at first; those that have their origin and life in the waters; those that have wings and fly in the air; those that creep and walk the land; and man, who bears the image of God and has dominion over the earth, and all its other inhabitants. And the distinctive natures of these four classes have been, and are, wholly incommunicable to one another. Each only produces creatures of its own kind. No other beings ever spring from the union of human beings but human beings, and human beings of identically the same distinctive nature as their parents. No other animals ever spring from four-footed beasts of the same kind but four-footed beasts of that kind; none from reptiles but reptiles; none from insects but insects; none from the inhabitants of the waters, but inhabitants of the waters; none from the fowls of the air, but fowls of the air. And this great law holds equally of all the great families into which those great classes of the animal world are divided. The whale gives birth only to the whale; the shark only propagates sharks;

the crocodile, crocodiles; the herring, herrings, and so throughout. No instance is known, of any one of the innumerable orders that people the waters, giving birth to progeny that are not of identically the same nature as themselves.

And so, also, of the birds of the air. The eggs of the eagle never yield any other young than eagles; the eggs of the ostrich never any other than ostriches; the brood of the condor are condors; of the heron, herons; of the peacock, peacocks; and the thrush, the nightingale, the jay, the robin, the wren, the humming-bird, only yield progeny of their own several natures.

So also of the inhabitants of the land. The elephant never pairs with any but its own kind, and never yields any other progeny than elephants; and so of the camel, the giraffe, the lion, the buffalo, the deer, the ox, the sheep, the hog: nor does the horse and the ass, when pairing with their own kind, ever give birth to offspring except of their own identical nature.

This law thus holds universally that creatures of the same kind give birth only to offspring of their own distinctive nature. The law holds, also, almost absolutely, that crea. tures of different kinds never unite and propagate; and a small number that are exceptions, of which the horse and the ass are the chief, yield a mixed progeny that cannot perpetuate itself. And this is verified not only by the observation and convictions of men generally of the present time, but of all past ages. All the laws which men have ever instituted for their government, whatever may have been the age or the nation in which they had their origin, have contemplated man as identically the same being in nature, sustaining essentially the same relations, owing much the same duties, exposed to the same temptations, and liable to the same physical evils. All historians have drawn precisely the same picture of his mind and his body, his passions and his actions, his enjoyments and his miseries, his life and his death. Moses, David, Solomon, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, the Greek and Latin orators and dramatists, painted him as exactly the same being as he is now. The sculptures and drawings of the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians, and the statues and paint

ings of the Greeks and Romans exhibit him as of identically the same form, size, acts, and expression as in the present age.

The descriptions also in the Pentateuch, and other most ancient parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, of the animals appointed for sacrifice, and others, as the horse, the ass, the camel, the lion, the bear, the fox, the hart, the eagle, the raven, the owl, exhibit them as of the same nature as those that now bear the same names; and the animals described by Aristotle are exactly the same in nature as those bearing the same names that now inhabit the land and sea of Greece and Asia Minor; and those depicted by Virgil and Pliny, the same as those of the present day, that inherit their name.

This constancy of animals to the nature of their progeni tors, this undeviating transmission by them of their distinctive peculiarities unaltered to their offspring, observed and acted upon by mankind of all generations, has been recog nised and held by naturalists generally, to be the law of their being. It is the faith, our author admits, with but two or three exceptions, of the whole body of eminent men who have made it a subject of special study.

Mr. Darwin, however, denies it. He believes in no such constancy in the nature either of animals or plants. He maintains that none of the living creatures or vegetables that now inhabit the earth have even essentially the same natures as the originals from which they are descended. Instead of being, by the law of descent, identically what their originals were by the creative fiat that gave them being, he holds that they owe their distinctive peculiarities to a gradual modification of those primary natures by casual and perpetually varying second causes. Thus he says:

"Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained, namely, that each species has been independently created, is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera, are lineal descendants of some other, and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species. Furthermore, I am convinced that

natural selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification."-P. 13.

"It may be asked how far I extend the doctrine of the modification of species. The question is difficult to answer, because, the more distinct the forms are which we may consider, by so much the arguments fall away in force. But some arguments of the greatest weight extend very far. All the members of whole classes can be connected together by chains of affinities, and all can be classified on the same principle, in groups subordinate to groups. Fossil remains sometimes tend to fill up very wide intervals between existing orders. Organs in a rudimentary condition plainly show that an early progenitor had the organ in a fully developed state; and this in some instances necessarily implies an enormous amount of modification in the descendants. Throughout whole classes various structures are formed on the same pattern, and at an embryonic age the species closely resemble each other. Therefore I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modification embraces all the members of the same class. I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.

"Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But an analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose, or oak-tree. Therefore I should infer from analogy, that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from SOME ONE PRIMORDIAL FORM, into which life was first breathed."-Pp. 418, 419.

He thus holds that not a single species of the organized beings that now inhabit the earth has the nature of the original from which it has descended; and that most have but a very slight touch of it. If all animals descended from but four or five progenitors, the modifications through which they have passed must have extended to all the essential elements of their bodily and psychical natures. Their instincts, their appetites, their passions, must have

undergone as great changes as their organization and their mode of life. How radical he holds their transmutations have been, is seen from his intimation that the horse may be a modification of the tapir, or the tapir of the horse, or that perhaps both may have descended from a common parent of a still different nature; and his avowal that he can believe that the whale was wrought by "natural selection" from a bear. "In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open. mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competition did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."-P. 165.

Man has, of course, on Mr. Darwin's theory, been the subject of these modifications in common with all other living creatures, and descended therefore from a progenitor essentially unlike himself; and perhaps a being without reason; a quadruped, a reptile, a fish, a bird, no one can tell what; and under the influence of the same causes is destined to assume, in a future age, a nature as unlike his present, as this is unlike the unknown original from which he drew his being.

The question whether Mr. Darwin's theory is true or not, is therefore of the greatest moment, not only in a scientific but in a theological relation. If man is not now the same being that he originally was, his obligations cannot be the same, the same moral government cannot be suited to him; nor can a redemption that contemplates the race as having one and the same nature, as subject to one and the same penalty, and needing one and the same expiation by the death of a Divine Redeemer united to their common nature, be possible.

Has Mr. Darwin then verified his theory? Has he invested it in any considerable measure with an air of truth? Has he furnished an array of facts and arguments that seem to support it to such a degree as to shield it from the discredit of an unscientific, wild, and atheistic dream? In our