In the marine and lacustrine floras of the lake, Mr. Miller observed
changes still more palpable. At the entrance of the sea, the _Fucus
nodosus_ and _Fucus vesiculosus_ flourish in their proper form and
magnitude. A little farther on in the lake, the F. nodosus disappears,
and the F. vesiculosus, though continuing to exist for mile after mile,
grows dwarfish and stunted, and finally disappears, giving place to
rushes and other aquatic grasses, till the lacustrine has entirely
displaced the marine flora. From these two important facts, the existence
of the fragment of _Asterolepis_ in the lower flagstones of the Orkneys,
and of the “curiously mixed semi-marine semi-lacustrine vegetation in the
Loch of Stennis,” which our author regards as bearing directly on the
development hypothesis, he takes occasion to submit that hypothesis to a
severe examination, and to point out its consequences—its incompatibility
with the great truths of morality and revealed religion. According
to Professor Oken, one of the ablest supporters of the development
theory, “There are two kinds of generation in the world, the creation
proper, and the propagation that is sequent thereon, or the _original
and secondary generation_. Consequently, no organism has been created
of larger size than an infusorial point. No organism is, or ever has
been created, which is not microscopic. Whatever is large has not been
created, but developed. Man has not been created, but developed.” Hence
it follows that during the great geological period, when race after race
was destroyed, and new forms of life called into being, “nature had been
pregnant with the human race,” and that immortal and intellectual Man is
but the development of the Brute—itself the development of some monad or
mollusc, which has been smitten into life by the action of electricity
upon a portion of gelatinous matter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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