cy are descended from a race of squirts--the squirts which you
picked up on the shore and squeezed, when you were a boy, discharging
these primitive Babcock Extinguishers upon your playfellows,
irreverently regardless of the harm done the poor squirt, the ancestor
of the human race. If you doubt it, here is the latest deliverance of
infallible science upon the subject. He describes the Ascidians: "They
hardly appear like animals, and consist of a simple tough leathery sack,
with two small projecting orifices. They belong to the Molluscoida of
Huxley, a lower division of the great family of the Mollusca; but they
have recently been placed by some naturalists among the vermes or worms.
Their larvae somewhat resemble tadpoles in shape, and have the power of
swimming freely about. * * * We should thus be justified in believing
that, at an extremely remote period, a group of animals existed
resembling in many respects the larvae of our present Ascidians, which
diverged into two great branches, the one retrograding in development
and producing the present class of Ascidians, the other rising to the
crown and summit of the animal kingdom, by giving birth to the
vertebrata."[8] Thus it appears that Mr. Darwin deduces his origin, and
that of mankind in general, from one of these Ascidians, or, in plain
English, makes them a race of squirts.

The notion of evolution is a belief that all living beings, plants as
well as animals, have not been created, but, like Topsy, just grew, from
the very smallest germs or spores. Evolutionists inform us that all
kinds of organisms have been evolved from four or five primeval germs or
spores; or more consistently with their great principle, that the simple
gave birth to the differentiated, from one primeval germ or egg. Mr.
Darwin alleges four or five primal forms, acknowledging that analogy
would lead him up to one. But other members of this school consistently
and boldly follow up the stream to its fountain, and allege a single
primeval living seed as the origin of all living things, and that this
must have been a microscopic animalcule, or plant spore, of the very
lowest order, which, multiplying its kind, gave birth to improved and
enlarged offspring; and they, in their turn, grew, and multiplied, and
differentiated into varieties; and so, in the course of endless ages,
the poorer sorts perishing and the better sorts prospering, the world
became filled with its existing populations, without