on the last page of the
Origin of Species, Sixth Edition, that he regards all living beings
not as separate creations but as the descendants in a direct line from
some fewer beings and Haeckel makes a distinct advance on this
ascribes "an entirely distinct source for plants and another for the
animal kingdom" and on and between both of them "a number of original
stems each of which has developed independently from one single
primary monistic form." (History of Creation page 397.) This original
form of life Herr Duehring discovers solely to bring it into contempt
by paralleling it with the first man according to Jewish tradition,
Adam. Here, unfortunately for Herr Duehring, he does not know how this
original Jew turns out, according to Smith's Assyrian discoveries to
have been the original Semite, and that the entire Biblical story of
the Creation and the Flood has been shown to have been taken from a
legendary store common to the Jews, Babylonians, Chaldeans, and
Assyrians.

It is brought forward as a severe and irrefutable reproach to Darwin
that he is at an end where the thread of descent fails him.
Unfortunately the whole of our science deserves the same reproach.
When the thread of descent fails it it is "at an end." It has not yet
come to the point of creating organic beings without an ancestry, not
even once has it been able to make simple protoplasm or other
albuminous bodily forms out of the chemical elements. It can only say
therefore with any certainty regarding the origin of life, that it
must have come about by a chemical process. But perhaps the
philosophy of realism can give us some assistance here since it is
engaged with independent organic natural products, without any descent
one from another. How can these come into being? By original creation?
But up to the present not even the most audacious advocates of
spontaneous generation have claimed to create in this way anything
except bacteria, fungi, or other very elementary organisms, but not
insects, birds, fish or mammals. If these homogeneous products of
nature--it is understood for all this discussion that they are
organic--are not related through descent, they or their ancestors,
then "where the thread of descent breaks" they must have been placed
in the world by a separate act of creation, and this again requires a
creator, what we call "deism."

Herr Duehring further explains that "it was a piece of superficiality
on the part of Darwin to make t