And yet again, how insultingly irreconcilable with any rational estimate of Divine nature is the possibility of any existing type of mammals having been created, seeing that if so, it must have been created with _false_ marks of nourishment from the womb of a mother that never existed! These are some of the main grounds on which the Darwinian theory rests. Of the abundance of detailed illustrations from which it may derive additional support no adequate idea can be formed, except by careful perusal of its author's own writings, and these fortunately may without much exaggeration be said to be in everybody's hands. Of the arguments that have been brought forward in opposition to it, all seem to me to be susceptible of very complete answers, and one or two of the strongest, of answers more complete than they have yet received. True, there is no disputing the testimony borne by the paintings and sculptures of Egyptian tombs, and of Ninevite palaces, that the basement floors in Thebes and Memphis were infested by much the same sort of beetles as those which are such nuisances in London kitchens; that Sardanapalus, if ever he exchanged indoor for outdoor sports, may have hunted with dogs and horses that might pass muster at an English meet, and that the Pharaohs were served by negro slaves as like as two peas in all externals to those who in the United States have recently and prematurely been metamorphosed into free and independent electors. But all this only proves that certain species which existed 4,000 years ago are still represented by unchanged descendants. It does not prove that other descendants and groups of descendants from the same species have not within the same period undergone changes sufficiently great to convert them into distinct races; neither, if it did prove thus much, would it do more than afford a presumption, and a very deceptive one, that 4,000 years are too short a time for the formation of a new race, affording besides, at the same time, much stronger presumption that, within the remotest limits to which Mosaic chronology can be pushed back, the various races of mankind, white, black, and intermediately tinted, can not possibly have descended from one pair of ancestors. That domesticated animals, when suffered to run wild, always return to the primitive wild type--this, instead of an argument against, is one of the strongest arguments for the evolution theory, from which it is indeed, as Mr. G. H. Lewes says, a necessary deduction. It is simply because, as the conditions of life change, structure must, for adaptation's sake, change likewise, that wild animals are capable of being domesticated, of being, that is, made to undergo modifications by being brought from the conditions of wildness to those of domesticity. How, then, should they possibly retain those modifications, how escape return to their previous shape and habits, when retransferred from domesticity to wildness?