Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/746

726 that it would continue to have a similar "origin" so long as such matter continued to "grow" under the most varied conditions upon and beneath the earth's surface. And, these conditions being fulfilled, we have a good a priori warrant for the belief that living matter is continually coming into being by virtue of the operation of the same "laws" or molecular properties as suffice to regulate its growth.

Let the Evolutionist attempt to deny it, and see what other difficulties he plunges into, in addition to that lack of consistency which I have already pointed out.

If an evolution of living matter occurred only far back beyond the depths of geologically-recorded time, and if, as Mr. Darwin would have us believe, "all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch," how is the Evolutionist to explain the existence of the multitudinous myriads of lowest and almost structureless organisms which exist at the present day? He starts, in his argument in favor of Evolution, from the fact that the condition of homogeneity is one of necessarily unstable equilibrium. All homogeneous matter inevitably tends to become heterogeneous, and, of the different kinds of matter, none unites within itself the various qualities tending to favor this passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous in the same degree as living matter. These tendencies are daily exemplified to us by the phases of embryonic development passed through by the more or less homogeneous germs of multitudinous complex organisms from which they proceed. The embryonic development of one of the higher animals—of man himself, for instance—is a kind of highly-condensed epitome of animal evolution in general. And the varied forms of life of higher organization, both animal and vegetal, which have existed and still exist upon the surface of our earth, are all supposed by the Evolutionist to have arisen by dint of insensible modifications wrought through the long lapse of ages upon successive generations of organic forms. But if living matter contains within itself the potentiality of undergoing such mighty changes and of ever growing in complexity—if from originally structureless protoplasm (that is, structureless, to our senses) all the varied forms of life have been derived, how is it that some of this very same matter should have remained through the long lapse of ages almost in its primitive structureless condition? Why should one portion of the living matter which came into being in pre-Cambrian epochs have passed through such marvelous changes, while another portion has continued to grow, through all the inconceivably numerous generations which must have occurred between that time and the present, without undergoing change?

In other words, what is the meaning of the existence of Bacteria,