_Büchner._ Indeed “the question of the first origin of all highly organized plants and animals appears at first sight incapable of solution without the assumption of a higher power, which has created the first organisms, and endowed them with the faculty of propagation” (p. 71). _Reader._ “At first sight,” you say. Very well. I accept this confession, which, on your lips, has a peculiarly suggestive meaning. _Büchner._ “Believing naturalists point to this fact with satisfaction. They remind us, at the same time, of the wonderful structure of the organic world, and recognize in it the prevalence of an immediate and personal creative power, which, full of design, has produced this world. ‘The origin of organic beings,’ says B. Cotta, ‘is, like that of the earth, an insoluble problem, leaving us only the appeal to an unfathomable power of a Creator’ ” (_ibid._) _Reader._ Cotta is more affirmative than you. He recognizes that the problem is incapable of solution without a Creator, and does not add “at first sight.” What do you reply? _Büchner._ “We might answer these believers, that the germs of all living beings had from eternity existed in universal space, or in the chaotic vapors from which the earth was formed; and these germs, deposited upon the earth, have there and then become developed, according to external necessary conditions. The facts of these successive organic generations would thus be sufficiently explained; and such an explanation is at least less odd and far‐fetched than the assumption of a creative power, which amused itself in producing, in every particular period, genera of plants and animals, as preliminary studies for the creation of man—a thought quite unworthy of the conception of a perfect Creator” (_ibid._) _Reader._ I am afraid, doctor, that all this nonsense proceeds from cold‐ hearted maliciousness more than from ignorance. For how can you be ignorant that, if there be anything odd and far‐fetched in any theory of cosmogony, it is not the recognition of a creative power, but the assumption of eternal germs wandering about from eternity amid chaotic vapors? Your preference for this last assumption is an insult to reason, which has no parallel but the act of passionate folly by which the Jews preferred Barabbas to Christ. The Creator, as you well know, had no need of “preliminary studies”: yet he might have “amused himself,” if he so wished,(22) in making different genera of plants and animals, just as noblemen and princes amuse themselves, without disgracing their rank, in planting gardens, and petting dogs, horses, and birds. But this is not the question. You pretend that the germs of all living beings had from eternity existed in universal space. This you cannot prove either philosophically or scientifically; and we have already established in a preceding discussion that nothing changeable can have existed from eternity. _Büchner._ “But we stand in need of no such arguments” (p. 72).