It would be decidedly wrong, in the present state of that which is popularly called science, to omit to inquire here what relation to the work of the fifth creative day those theories of development and evolution which have obtained so great currency may bear. The long time employed in the introduction of the lower animals, the use of the terms "make" and "form," instead of "create," and the expression "let the waters bring forth," may well be understood as countenancing some form of mediate creation, or of "creation by law," or "theistic evolution," as it has been termed; but they give no countenance to the idea either of the spontaneous evolution of living beings under the influence of merely physical causes and without creative intervention, or of the transmutation of one kind of animal into another. Still, with reference to this last idea, it is plain that revelation gives us no definition of species as distinguished from varieties or races, so that there is nothing to prevent the supposition that, within certain limits indicated by the expression "after its kind," animals or plants may have been so constituted as to vary greatly in the progress of geological time. If we ask whether any thing is known to science which can give even a decided probability to the notion that living beings are parts of an undirected evolution proceeding under merely dead insentient forces, and without intention, the answer must be emphatically no. I have elsewhere fully discussed these questions, and may here make some general statements as to certain scientific facts which at present bar the way against the hypothesis of evolution as applied to life, and especially against that form of it to which Darwin and his disciples have given so great prominence. 1. The albuminous or protoplasmic material, which seems to be necessary to the existence of every living being, is known to us as a product only of the action of previously living protoplasm. Though it is often stated that the production of albumen from its elements is a process not differing from the formation of water or any other inorganic material from its elements, this statement is false in fact, since, though many so-called organic substances have been produced by chemical processes, no particle of either living or non-living organizable matter of the nature of protoplasm has ever been so produced. The origin, therefore, of this albuminous matter is as much a mystery to us at present as that of any of the chemical elements.