so busy “napping the chuckie-stanes” and chipping out flint knives and arrow-heads in the time of the drift, very many ages ago,—­before the British Channel existed, says Lyell[1],—­and until these men of the olden time are shown to have worn their great-toes in a divergent and thumb-like fashion.  That would be evidence indeed:  but until some testimony of the sort is produced, we must needs believe in the separate and special creation of man, however it may have been with the lower animals and with plants.

No doubt, the full development and symmetry of Darwin’s hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal,—­that all are equally “lineal descendants of sense few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited.”  But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural beginning of life on earth, in some form or forms of being which included potentially all that have since existed and are yet to be, he is thereby not warranted to extend his inferences beyond the evidence or the fair probability.  There seems as great likelihood that one special origination should be followed by another upon fitting occasion, (such as the introduction of man,) as that one form should be transmuted into another upon fitting occasion, as, for instance, in the succession of species which differ from each other only in some details.  To compare small things with great in a homely illustration:  man alters from time to time his instruments or machines, as new circumstances or conditions may require and his wit suggest.  Minor alterations and improvements he adds to the machine he possesses:  he adapts a new rig or a new rudder to an old boat:  this answers to variation.  If boats could engender, the variations would doubtless be propagated, like those of domestic cattle.  In course of time the old ones would be worn out or wrecked; the best sorts would be chosen for each particular use, and further improved upon, and so the primordial boat be developed into the scow, the skiff, the sloop, and other species of water-craft,—­the very diversification, as well as the successive improvements, entailing the disappearance of many intermediate forms, less adapted to any one particular purpose; wherefore these go slowly out of use, and become extinct species:  this is natural selection.  Now let a great and important advance be made, like that of steam-navigation:  here, though the engine might be added to the old vessel, yet the wiser and therefore the actual way is to make a new vessel on a modified plan:  this may answer to specific creation.  Anyhow, the one does not necessarily exclude the other.  Variation and natural selection may play their part, and so may specific creation also.  Why not?

[Footnote 1:  Vide Proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1859, and London Athenaeum, passim.  It appears to be conceded that these “celts” or stone knives are artificial productions, and of the age of the mammoth, the fossil rhinoceros, etc.]