simultaneous creation of organic families of different species or
typical forms. The advocate of the former goes back along the
interminable vistas of geologic time, tracing his ancestral line
through the sinking forms of animal life, until, with the aid of a
microscope, he sees a closed vesicle of structureless membrane;
and this he recognises as the scientific Adam. This theory has
been brought into fresh discussion by Mr. Darwin in his rich and
striking work on the Origin of Species12 The other view contrasts
widely with this, and is not essentially different from the
account in Genesis. It shows God himself creating by regular
methods, in natural materials, not by a vicegerent law, not with
the anthropomorphitic hands of an external potter. Every organized
fabric, however complex, originates in a single physiological
cell. Every individual organism from the simple plant known as red
snow to the oak, from the zoophyte to man is developed from such a
cell. This is unquestionable scientific knowledge. The phenomenal
process of organic advancement is through growth of the cell by
selective appropriation of material, self multiplication of the
cell, chemical transformations of the pabulum of the cell,
endowment of the muscular and nervous tissues produced by those
transformations with vital and psychical properties.

But the essence of the problem lies in the question, Why does one
of these simple cells become a cabbage, another a rat, another a
whale, another a man? Within the limits of known observation
during historic time, every organism yields seed or bears progeny
after its own kind. Between all neighboring species there are
impassable, discrete chasms. The direct reason, therefore, why one
cell stops in completion at any given vegetable stage, another at
a certain animal stage, is that its producing parent was that
vegetable or that animal. Now, going back to the first individual
of each kind, which had no determining parent like itself, the
theory of the gradually ameliorating development of one species
out of the next below it is one mode of solving the problem.
Another mode more satisfactory at least to theologians and their
allies is to conclude that God, the Divine Force, by whom the life
of the universe is given, made the world after an ideal plan,
including a systematic arrangement of all the possible
modifications. This plan was in his thought, in the unity of all
its parts, from the beginning; and the