Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/720

702 for the chimeras which we had best not seek to acquire. But Prof. Agassiz does not even suggest any other process for our acceptance. He simply retreats upon his empty phrases, "creative will," the "free workings of an intelligent mind," and so on. Now, in his second course of lectures, I hope he will proceed to tell us, not necessarily how "creative will" actually operated in bringing forth a new species, but how it may conceivably have operated, save through the process of physical generation, which we know. In his "Essay on Classification," I remember a passage in which he rightly rejects the notion that any species has arisen from a single pair of parents, and propounds the formula: "Pines have originated in forests, heaths in heather, grasses in prairies, bees in hives, herrings in shoals, buffaloes in herds, men in nations." Now, when Prof. Agassiz asserts that men originated in nations, by some other process than that of physical generation, what does he mean? Does he mean that men dropped down from the sky? Does he mean that the untold millions of organic particles which make up a man all rushed together from the four quarters of the compass, and proceeded, spontaneously or by virtue of some divine sorcery, to aggregate themselves into the infinitely complex organs and tissues of the human body, with all their wondrous and well-defined aptitudes? It is time that this question should be faced, by Prof. Agassiz and those who agree with him, without further shirking. Instead of grandiloquent phrases about the "free action of an intelligent mind," let us have something like a candid suggestion of some process, other than that of physical generation, by which a creature like man can even be imagined to have come into existence. When the time comes for answering this question, we shall find that even Prof. Agassiz is utterly dumb and helpless. The sonorous phrase "special creation," in which he has so long taken refuge, is nothing but a synthesis of vocal sounds which covers and, to some minds, conceals a thoroughly idiotic absence of sense or significance. To say that "Abracadabra is not a genial corkscrew," is to make a statement quite as full of meaning as the statement that species have originated by "special creation."

The purely theological (or theologico-metaphysical and at all events unscientific) character of Prof. Agassiz's objections to the development theory is sufficiently shown by the fact that, in the foregoing paragraphs, I have considered whatever of any account there is in his lectures which can be regarded as an objection. Arguments against the development theory such objections cannot be called: they are, at their very best, nothing but expressions of fear and dislike. The only remark which I have been able to find, worthy of being dignified as an argument, is the following: "We see that fishes are lowest, that reptiles are higher, that birds have a superior organization to both, and that mammals, with man at their head, are highest. The phases of development which a quadruped undergoes, in his embryonic