The notion that all organic beings have been such as we now see them from the beginning, was almost inevitable, as long as the theory was held that the formation of the world was of comparatively recent date; and those who, without further investigation, held the traditional belief of the independent and individual creation of each species, could only offer one explanation, if all animals--all plants--are as they are it is because it has pleased the Creator to make them so. Because the Darwinian theory has cast a doubt on the successive creation of living things, it has been said that Darwin’s views were inimical to religion. These impressions are transitory--as were those expressed by Leibniz when he reproached Newton with introducing “occult qualities and miracles into philosophy;”[11] and when he attacked his law of gravitation “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed religion.”[11] After explaining in what manner nature had produced all the variations of plants and inferior animals from a small number of germs, Darwin did not feel himself under the necessity of adding one more to the germs in order that what was afterwards termed humanity might appear on the scene; the principle of evolution as already applied to the organic world, would suffice to explain all difficulties; the natural forces all engaged in the same movement, would spread and branch out in various directions, until they reached the culminating point of incorporation with the human creature. Darwin’s book, the _Descent of Man_, contains the genealogical table of this higher animal which the author so often compares with the lower animals. If both have so much in common, such as the chemical composition of their bodies--their germinal vesicles--their laws of growth and reproduction; it is--so he conceives--that both have come from the same ancestor; moreover, all helps to prove that man has received from his prototype amongst the mammifers, all the special characteristics of its own organs. Thus it is easy to understand that in the eyes of many naturalists the embryonic structure is of more importance for an accurate classification than that of an adult, since the embryo is that condition in which the animal has undergone the least modification, thus it better represents the original form of the primitive progenitor.