ion an
outstanding feature of all animal life, the evident likeness of plan
upon which the _entire kingdom_ of sentient life is constructed. From
amoeba and other infusorial animals of simplest structure, through coral
and oyster, bird, reptile, to mammals, there is an evident gradation,
many structures being represented in entire great groups of living
beings, such as the air-breathing lung. Here is a grand plan of animal
life, which permits us to classify all living things into a system.
There are classes and subclasses, orders or families, suborders, tribes,
sub-tribes, genera, species, and varieties, just as in the world of
plants and even, according to their atomic weight, among the elements.
We see in all this, Creative Design. The evolutionist believes that he
can percive [tr. note: sic] stages of progress. Similarity of plan is
interpreted as proof that there is a common origin. Are we to admit, in
the face of all that has been said about the fixity of species (to
mention only this), the reasonableness of such an assumption? Does
orderliness and plan argue for development? The steam-engine is a
machine of remarkable structure. It has had, in one sense of the term,
a wonderful "evolution." It is based on certain principles, the
foundation one of which is the expansibility of steam, and its ability,
when confined in a cylinder, to give motion to a piston. The
steam-engine was first used for pumping, then for turning machinery,
then for propelling boats, and now its crowning department is seen in
the locomotive. There is a plan, a likeness, a similarity, which runs
through all steam-engines, whether they be found in the mine, in the
mill, beneath the deck of the steamship, or on the railroad track. But
the locomotive is not formed from the mine engine; it is made new, and
is a distinct type. And yet, the same principles are seen in both. Even
so it is with the genera of animals. The whale and the elephant both
have backbones, jointed limbs, warm blood, and a hundred homologous
organs. They are both mammals, both are sagacious, and are gifted with
acute senses. But otherwise they are unlike as the monster locomotive
that pulls the heavy train over the Sierras, and the compound engines of
the _Vaterland_. Similarity of structures argues powerfully for unity of
plan, but by no means proves identity of origin.

The evidence of design in nature conflicts with the idea that all things
in the organic domain have come to b