Is it conceivable that this transformation could take place? Could such a condition and situation result in anything but the utter extinction of the human race, or, in other words, in an absolute break? Could there be any modifications exhibited by the last survivors of that race other than those which are familiar to us among the varieties of the human species which have never separated themselves from their race, and between whom and their ancestral stock, wherever it was originally placed on this globe, we recognize no fundamental difference of structure, whatever may have been the changes of habitat or conditions of life? Yet the conditions and elements of this imaginary case, which is simply the process of evolution reversed, are just what the evolution theory assumes as the causes of that modification which proceeds from a lower to a higher organism; and whatever may be said of the tendency, through "the survival of the fittest," to evolve higher out of lower forms of animal life, if we allow time enough for the process, there is no reason, in the nature of things, why corresponding conditions should not lead to a degradation as well as to an elevation in the scale of beings. There is, however, one reason why no such potency should be ascribed to the conditions, either in respect to the one result or the other. That reason is that all such causes of modification, either in the ascending or the descending scale, are so limited in their effects that distinct beings can not be rationally predicated as their product, whereas the power of the Infinite Artificer to give existence to distinct beings is absolutely without limit. If naturalists would turn their attention to the limitations upon the power of all such causes as those which are supposed to work in the process of evolution, and would give us the explanations to which those limitations point, in those cases of local variation which are exhibited by animals that can clearly be traced to a parent form, they would not be compelled to resort to a sweeping theory that refuses all force to any hypothesis but its own.