land animals may have been dispersed over the
earth by the direct agency of man for his use or pleasure he asks: "Who
would like to get different sorts of lions, bears, tigers, and other
ferocious and noxious creatures on board ship? who would trust himself
with them? and who would wish to plant colonies of such creatures in
new, desirable lands?"

His conclusion is that plants and animals take their origin in the lands
wherein they are found; an opinion which he supports by quoting from the
two narrations in Genesis passages which imply generative force in earth
and water.

But in the eighteenth century matters had become even worse for the
theological view. To meet the difficulty the eminent Benedictine, Dom
Calmet, in his Commentary, expressed the belief that all the species of
a genus had originally formed one species, and he dwelt on this view
as one which enabled him to explain the possibility of gathering all
animals into the ark. This idea, dangerous as it was to the fabric of
orthodoxy, and involving a profound separation from the general doctrine
of the Church, seems to have been abroad among thinking men, for we
find in the latter half of the same century even Linnaeus inclining to
consider it. It was time, indeed, that some new theological theory be
evolved; the great Linnaeus himself, in spite of his famous declaration
favouring the fixity of species, had dealt a death-blow to the
old theory. In his Systema Naturae, published in the middle of the
eighteenth century, he had enumerated four thousand species of animals,
and the difficulties involved in the naming of each of them by Adam and
in bringing them together in the ark appeared to all thinking men more
and more insurmountable.

What was more embarrassing, the number of distinct species went on
increasing rapidly, indeed enormously, until, as an eminent zoological
authority of our own time has declared, "for every one of the species
enumerated by Linnaeus, more than fifty kinds are known to the
naturalist of to-day, and the number of species still unknown doubtless
far exceeds the list of those recorded."

Already there were premonitions of the strain made upon Scripture by
requiring a hundred and sixty distinct miraculous interventions of the
Creator to produce the hundred and sixty species of land shells found
in the little island of Madeira alone, and fourteen hundred distinct
interventions to produce the actual number of distinct species of a
s