excluded)—then why should not this imperfect creative faculty in man be the very guarantee that God possesses it in perfection? Such at least is the conclusion of one who, studying certain families of plants, which indulge in the most fantastic varieties of shape and size, and yet through all their vagaries retain—as do the Palms, the Orchids, the Euphorbiaceæ—one organ, or form of organs, peculiar and highly specialized, yet constant throughout the whole of each family, has been driven to the belief that each of these three families, at least, has “sported off” from one common ancestor—one archetypal Palm, one archetypal Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia, simple, it may be, in itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of new and complex beauty, to be developed, not in it, but in its descendants. He has asked himself, sitting alone amid the boundless wealth of tropic forests, whether even then and there the great God might not be creating round him, slowly but surely, new forms of beauty? If he chose to do it, could He not do it? That man found himself none the worse Christian for the thought. He has said—and must be allowed to say again, for he sees no reason to alter his words—in speaking of the wonderful variety of forms in the Euphorbiaceæ, from the weedy English Euphorbias, the Dog’s Mercuries, and the Box, to the prickly-stemmed Scarlet Euphorbia of Madagascar, the succulent Cactus-like Euphorbias of the Canaries and elsewhere; the Gale-like Phyllanthus; the many-formed Crotons; the Hemp-like Maniocs, Physic-nuts, Castor-oils, the scarlet Poinsettia, the little pink and yellow Dalechampia, the poisonous Manchineel, and the gigantic Hura, or sandbox tree, of the West Indies,—all so different in shape and size, yet all alike in their most peculiar and complex fructification, and in their acrid milky juice,—“What if all these forms are the descendants of one original form? Would that be one whit the more wonderful than the theory that they were, each and all, with the minute, and often imaginary, shades of difference between certain cognate species among them, created separately and at once? But if it be so—which I cannot allow—what would the theologian have to say, save that God’s works are even more wonderful than he always believed them to be? As for the theory being impossible—that is to be decided by men of science, on strict experimental grounds. As for us theologians, who are we, that we should limit, à priori, the power of God? ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ asked the prophet of old; and we have a right to ask it as long as the world shall last. If it be said that ‘natural selection,’ or, as Mr. Herbert Spencer better defines it, the ‘survival of the fittest,’ is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety—that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively by men of science, on their own grounds. We, meanwhile, always knew that God works