selection acting through that long vista of ages which he casts mistily over the earth upon the most favoured individuals of his species.  We care not in these pages to push the argument further.  We have done enough for our purpose in thus succinctly intimating its course.  If any of our readers doubt what must be the result of such speculations carried to their logical and legitimate conclusion, let them turn to the pages of Oken, and see for themselves the end of that path the opening of which is decked out in these pages with the bright hues and seemingly innocent deductions of the transmutation-theory.

Nor can we doubt, secondly, that this view, which thus contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its Creator, is equally inconsistent with the fullness of His glory.  It is, in truth, an ingenious theory for diffusing throughout creation the working and so the personality of the Creator.  And thus, however unconsciously to him who holds them, such views really tend inevitably to banish from the mind most of the peculiar attributes of the Almighty.

How, asks Mr. Darwin, can we possibly account for the manifest plan, order, and arrangement which pervade creation, except we allow to it this self-developing power through modified descent?

As Milne-Edwards has well expressed it, Nature is prodigal in variety, but niggard in innovation.  Why, on the theory of creation, should this be so?  Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in nature, be so commonly linked together by graduated steps?  Why should not Nature have taken a leap from structure to structure?—­p. 194.

And again:—­

It is a truly wonderful fact—­the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity—­that all animals and plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold, namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes.—­pp. 128-9.

How can we account for all this?  By the simplest and yet the most comprehensive answer.  By declaring the stupendous fact that all creation is the transcript in matter of ideas eternally existing in the mind of the Most High—­that order in the utmost perfectness of its relation pervades His works, because it exists as in its centre and highest fountain-head in Him the Lord of all.  Here is the true account of the fact which has so utterly misled shallow observers, that Man himself, the Prince and Head of this creation, passes in the earlier stages of his being through phases of existence closely analogous, so far as his