And, if the question is asked, What is to be the end of this world? or if we go forward in imagination toward the probable end of all this animal life, I can not see that the hypothesis of evolution has more to recommend it than the hypothesis of special creations in reference to the perfectibility of the world, or to the sum of approximate perfection that seems to be attainable. As, upon either of the two hypotheses, a perfect world does not even now seem to have demanded an absence of suffering, since suffering tends obviously to produce greater benefit than could have followed from its absence, so, in the remotest conceivable future, a nearer and nearer approximation to a state of universal happiness will continue to be worked out by physical and moral causes, which will be as potent under the system of special creations as they can be supposed to be under the system of evolution. It is true that the moral causes will supplement and aid the physical under either of the two systems. But one difficulty with the evolution theory as the sole method by which the past or present inhabitants of the world have come into existence is that, so far as we can judge, it has done and completed its work just as effectually and finally as special creation appears to have terminated in certain forms, some of which are extinct and some of which are living. Take the Darwinian pedigree of man, as stated in a former chapter, or any other mode of tracing the supposed stages of animal evolution. The process has hypothetically culminated in man. At whatever species in the ascending scale you pause, you find that the particular type of animal has either become extinct or that it has continued and still continues to be produced in that same type, with only such variations and incidental differences as have resulted from changed conditions of life, and from the intermingling of different breeds of the same animal. I do not now speak of the theory, which admits, of course, of the hypothetical development of every known animal, past or present, out of its supposed predecessors. But I speak of the facts as yet revealed by the researches of naturalists among all the extinct and living forms of animal life. If there had ever been discovered any one instance in which it could be claimed by satisfactory proof that an animal of a distinct species had been evolved out of races of animals of a fundamentally different organization, and without the special interposition of any creating power operating to make a new organism, we should certainly have it cited and relied upon as a fact of the utmost importance. I do not say that it would be reasonable to expect direct and ocular demonstration of such a product, any more than it would be reasonable to expect direct and ocular demonstration of an act of special creation. But I say that it could be shown by proofs that ought to be satisfactory if there were any evidence from which the