I find it impossible to attribute the biological phenomena, which
have been and still are going on upon the surface of our globe, to
the simple action of physical forces. I believe they are due, in
their entirety, as well as individually, to the direct intervention
of a creative power, acting freely and in an autonomic way. . .I
have tried to make this intentional plan in the organization of the
animal kingdom evident, by showing that the differences between
animals do not constitute a material chain, analogous to a series
of physical phenomena, bound together by the same law, but present
themselves rather as the phases of a thought, formulated according
to a definite aim. I think we know enough of comparative anatomy to
abandon forever the idea of the transformation of the organs of one
type into those of another. The metamorphoses of certain animals,
and especially of insects, so often cited in support of this idea,
prove, by the fixity with which they repeat themselves in
innumerable species, exactly the contrary. In the persistency of
these metamorphoses, distinct for each species and known to repeat
themselves annually in a hundred thousand species, and to have done
so ever since the present order of things was established on the
earth, have we not the most direct proof that the diversity of
types is not due to external natural influences? I have followed
this idea in all the types of the animal kingdom. I have also tried
to show the direct intervention of a creative power in the
geographical distribution of organized beings on the surface of the
globe when the species are definitely circumscribed. As evidence of
the fixity of generic types and the existence of a higher and free
causal power, I have made use of a method which appears to me new
as a process of reasoning. The series of reptiles, for instance, in
the family of lizards, shows apodal forms, forms with rudimentary
feet, then with a successively larger number of fingers until we
reach, by seemingly insensible gradations, the genera Anguis,
Ophisaurus, and Pseudopus, the Chamosauria, Chirotes, Bipes, Sepo,
Scincus, and at last the true lizards. It would seem to any
reasonable man that these types are the transformations of a single
primitive type, so closely do the modifications approach each
other; and yet I now reject any such supposition, and after having
studied the facts most thoroughly, I find in them a direct proof of
the creation of all these species. It must not be forgotten that
the genus Anguis belongs to Europe, the Ophisaurus to North
America, the Pseudopus to Dalmatia and the Caspian steppe, the Sepo
to Italy, etc. Now, I ask how portions of the earth so absolutely
distinct could have combined to form a continuous zoological
series, now so strikingly distributed, and whether the idea of this
development could have started from any other source than a
creative purpose manifested in space? These same purposes, this
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