Anyhow, the one does not
necessarily exclude the other. Variation and natural selection may
play their part, and so may specific creation also. Why not?
[Footnote 1: Vide _Proceedings of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science_, 1859, and London _Athenaeum_, passim. It
appears to be conceded that these "celts" or stone knives are
artificial productions, and of the age of the mammoth, the fossil
rhinoceros, etc.]
This leads us to ask for the reasons which call for this new theory
of transmutation. The beginning of things must needs lie in
obscurity, beyond the bounds of proof, though within those of
conjecture or of analogical inference. Why not hold fast to the
customary view, that all species were directly, instead of
indirectly, created after their respective kinds, as we now behold
them,--and that in a manner which, passing our comprehension, we
intuitively refer to the supernatural? Why this continual striving
after "the unattained and dim,"--these anxious endeavors, especially
of late years, by naturalists and philosophers of various schools and
different tendencies, to penetrate what one of them calls "the
mystery of mysteries," the origin of species? To this, in general,
sufficient answer may be found in the activity of the human
intellect, "the delirious yet divine desire to know," stimulated as
it has been by its own success in unveiling the laws and processes of
inorganic Nature,--in the fact that the principal triumphs of our age
in physical science have consisted in tracing connections where none
were known before, in reducing heterogeneous phenomena to a common
cause or origin, in a manner quite analogous to that of the reduction
of supposed independently originated species to a common ultimate
origin,--thus, and in various other ways, largely and legitimately
extending the domain of secondary causes.
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