yet exerting all their logic and rhetoric in defence of “creative fiats”--which is simply the preformation hypothesis “writ large.” 101. It would not be difficult to show that the doctrine of Epigenesis, with which Wolff forever displaced the doctrine of Preformation, leads by an inevitable logic to the doctrine of universal Evolution; and that we can no more understand the appearance of a new organism which is not the modification of some already existing organism, than we can understand the sudden appearance of a new organ which is not the modification of some existing structure. In the one case as in the other we may disguise the process under such terms as creative fiat and preformation; but these terms are no explanations; they re-state the results, they do not describe the process; whereas Epigenesis describes the process as it passes under the eye of science. 102. If any reader of these pages who, from theological or zoölogical suspicion of the Development Hypothesis, clings to the hypothesis of a creative Plan which once for all arranged the organic world in Types that could not change, will ask what rational interpretation can be given to the succession of phases each embryo is forced to pass through, it may help to give him pause. He will observe that _none_ of these phases have any adaptation to the future state of the animal, but are in positive contradiction to it, or are simply purposeless; whereas all show stamped on them the unmistakable characters of _ancestral_ adaptations and the progressions of Organic Evolution. What does the fact imply? There is not a single known example of a complex organism which is not developed out of simpler forms. Before it can attain the complex structure which distinguishes it, there must be an evolution of forms similar to those which distinguish the structures of organisms lower in the series. On the hypothesis of a Plan which prearranged the organic world, nothing could be more unworthy of a supreme intelligence than this inability to construct an organism at once, without previously making several tentative efforts, undoing to-day what was so carefully done yesterday, and _repeating for centuries the same tentatives, and the same corrections, in the same succession_. Do not let us blink this consideration. There is a traditional phrase much in vogue among the anthropomorphists, which arose naturally enough from the tendency to take human methods as an explanation of the divine--a phrase which becomes a sort of argument--“The Great Architect.” But if we are to admit the human point of view, a glance at the facts of embryology must produce very uncomfortable reflections. For what should we say to an architect who was unable, or being able was obstinately unwilling, to erect a palace except by first using his materials in the shape of a hut, then pulling it down and rebuilding them as a cottage, then adding story to story and room to room, _not_ with any reference