"The assumption that God has created man perfect, _i. e._, in body, but without power of judgment, and that he obtained this only by transgressing a command and a prohibition, and thus by a crime, so that he first began to degenerate upon the awakening in him of the divine intellect and reason, we leave wholly one side as absolutely contradicted by positive science, and only inquire, how, then, did man originate in so low a form? There are but two answers to this question. The one is, that man was placed upon the earth by an outside power in full size, rudeness and stupidity, in order to be left to his fate there in an unknown land, and to struggle for his existence with unknown animals. Or, on the other hand, that man was developed in a quite natural way, according to the law of evolution, out of the class of animals standing next below him. You are aware that we do not favor the first view, but so much the more earnestly embrace the latter. According to the law of evolution and adaptation the talents and capacities of animals were steadily changed in the course of thousands of years, following the changed relations of climate and soil, so as to fit themselves for the new conditions of sustenance and existence. In proportion as all nature became changed, so that at the end of a so-called geological period no comparison could be made with the beginning of the next preceding one, in that same proportion and measure the plants and animals had also changed, so that scarcely any more resemblance existed between these and those from which they originated. It is self-evident that amid such changes only those specimens continued to exist, which had adapted themselves in their progressive development in their organs and capacities in the best way to the new conditions of their existence. All those which had not thus changed lost the conditions of their existence and died out. But where did these organs and capacities, fitted to the newer relations, gain their form and development? In the mother-pouch of the female, undoubtedly! And of course this improvement advanced with each succeeding generation, so that animals which originally only lived in water, through gradual efforts to go on dry land also, to which, perhaps, they were forced to preserve their species, thereby changed the original fins into legs and later into web-feet by which they were adapted to live in water as well as on land (amphibia).