He further supposes that when special creations are appealed to, “the order of nature is put aside.” He therefore pretends that the order of nature would not allow of the creation of plants and animals, evidently because it was nature’s duty to perform without extrinsic intervention all those wonderful works which we attribute to the wisdom and omnipotence of the Creator. We maybe unscientific; but we defy Mr. Youmans to show, either scientifically or otherwise, the truth of his assumption. To tell us that the evolution of life from dead matter was within the order of nature, without even attempting to prove that nature had a power adequate to the task, is just as plausible as to tell us that Prof. Huxley has created the Niagara Falls or that Mr. Darwin has painted the moon. And yet the author of such loose statements airs his scientific pretensions and speaks of “scientific minds”! We have no need to follow Mr. Youmans any further; for what he adds consists of assumptions cognate to those we have already refuted. “Genetic derivation,” he says, “is in the field as a real and undeniable cause”—which is an open untruth. “Has anybody seen a special creation?” This is irrelevant. “Do those who believe in a special creation represent to themselves any possibility of how it could have occurred?” Probably they do, if they have read the first chapter of Genesis. “Milton attempted to form an image of the way the thing was done, and says that the animals burst up full-formed and perfect like plants out of the ground—'the grassy clods now calved.’ But clods can only calve miraculously.” Quite so; but we must not be afraid of miracles, when we cannot deny them without falling into absurdities. “Nature does not bring animals into the world now by this method, and science certainly can know nothing of it.” Yes; but there are many other things of which infidel science is ignorant. And yet we fancy that, when animals have been once created, even infidel science might have discerned that their procreation no longer required “the grassy clods to calve.” But enough. We conclude that, so far from being possible, so far from being probable, so far from being proved, the hypothesis of the origin of animal forms by evolution is simply unthinkable; it is a violation not only of the order of nature, but of the very condition of thought and of the first principle of science, which is the principle of causality. When will our scientific men understand that there is no science without philosophy? A WAIF FROM THE GREAT EXHIBITION, PHILADELPHIA, 1876 “Their store-houses full, flowing out of this into that. “They have called the people happy that hath these things: but happy is that people whose God is the Lord.”—Ps. cxliii. I.