It will be seen from these considerations that in attempting to decide
between the two hypotheses of the _origin_ of species--the only ones
ever suggested--namely the fashioning of them out of dead matter, or
their descent with modification from pre-existing forms, we are dealing
with a problem of much greater complexity than could possibly have been
imagined by the early speculators on the subject.

The two strongly contrasted hypotheses to which we have referred are
often spoken of as 'creation' and 'evolution.' But this is an altogether
illegitimate use of these terms. By _whatever method_ species of plants
or animals come into existence, they may be rightly said to be
'created.' We speak of the existing plants and animals as having been
created, although we well know them to have been 'evolved' from seeds,
eggs and other 'germs'--and indeed from those excessively minute and
simple structures known as 'cells.' Lyell and Darwin, as we shall
presently see, though they were firmly convinced that species of plants
and animals were slowly developed and not suddenly manufactured, wrote
constantly and correctly of the 'creation' of new forms of life.

The idea of 'descent with modification,' derived from the early
speculations of hunters and herdsmen, is really a much nobler and more
beautiful conception of 'creation' than that of the 'fashioning out of
clay,' which commended itself to the primitive agriculturalists.

Lyell writing to his friend John Herschel, who like himself believed in
the derivation of new species from pre-existing ones by the action of
secondary causes, wrote in 1836:--

When I first came to the notion, ... of a succession of
extinction of species, and creation of new ones, going on
perpetually now, and through an indefinite period of the past,
and to continue for ages to come, all in accommodation to the
changes which must continue in the inanimate and habitable
earth, the idea struck me as the grandest which I had ever
conceived, so far as regards the attributes of the Presiding
Mind[7].'

And Darwin concludes his presentment of the doctrine of evolution in the
_Origin of Species_ in 1859 with the following sentence:--

'There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a
few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone
cycling on according to the fixed law of grav