animals is different.  Here, then, he could distinguish and perhaps name the species; but what more was to be done?  All natural history as a study seemed to end in classifying and giving long names to plants and animals.  The Evolution theory at once gave it a new object.  Why is the dental formula of the viverrinae different?  What purpose has the long spur in the flower of Angraecum, or the marvellous bucket of Coryanthes, the flytrap of Dionaea, the pitcher of Nepenthes?  What is the cause, what is the purpose, what is the plan in the scheme of nature, of these structures?  Under the stimulus of such questions naturalists woke up to new views of classification, to new experiments, inquiries, and to research for facts and the explanation of facts, in all quarters of the globe.  No wonder that science rose, under such an impulse, as a butterfly from its chrysalis.  But some will not be satisfied with any scheme the parts of which are separated, or which admits of anything unknown or unexplainable.  They want to unite all into one grand and simple whole, which glorifies their own intelligence, and does not force them to humble patience and waiting for more light.  And then the fatal enmity of the human heart—­which is a plain fact, an undeniable tendency—­delights to get rid of the idea of God’s Sovereignty, the humbling sense that everything is at His absolute disposal, and nothing could be but as He wills it.  It seems so satisfactory to eliminate all external mysterious power, to make the whole “totus teres atque rotundus”—­having started the great machine of being somehow to see it all expand and unroll of itself and advance to the end.

Imagination leaps the chasms, minimizes the difficulties, passes from the possible to the certain, from the “may have been” to the “must have been” and to “it was so,” and, fascinated with the completeness of its scheme, commences to denounce and revile as ignorant and unscientific all that would, calmly appeal to evidence, and confess ignorance, or at least a suspended judgment, in any stage where the evidence is negative or incomplete.

It has been well observed that “men are so constituted that completeness gives a special kind of satisfaction of its own, and a habit of specially regarding the general uniformity of nature begets a desire to assume its absolute and universal uniformity.”

There is a great mystery underlying life and the plan in which the animal form, the organs of sight, hearing, and the rest, run through the whole creation:  and, given a mystery, there is always ample room for speculation.  Taking firm hold of the facts of development and variation, the extreme evolutionist is carried away with the idea of having the same principle throughout:  he is impatient of any line or any check; he is therefore prepared to ignore all difficulties, to hope against hope for the discovery of to him necessary—­but, alas, non-existent—­intermediate forms, till at last he comes to deny, not only his God, but his own soul, as a spiritual and supra-physical entity.[1]