Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/551

Rh He mentions also the existence of rudimentary toes in the horse, the rudimentary feet of serpents, the undeveloped wings of the ostrich, the teats of male mammals, the os coccygis in man. "The single fact of the existence of abortive or rudimentary organs condemns" the "idea of a separate creation for each organic form; . . . for these, on such a supposition could be regarded in no other light than as blemishes or blunders." Such a thing was "most irreconcilable with that idea of Almighty Perfection" which the special creationists were at least as anxious as the author of the "Vestiges" to maintain. Chambers gave the argument, here, a pious turn which did not increase its logical force. But he made the main point plain enough. The special creation theory could make nothing of rudimentary organs; viewed in the light of the theory of development, as incidental to natural descent with gradual modification, they appeared normal, intelligible and instructive.

It is worth while, perhaps, before concluding, to bring the last six arguments together, in a single general view of their logical bearings. No one of them, nor all of them collectively, ever amounted to more than "circumstantial evidence" of the transformation of species; none of them actually exhibits any species in flagrante delicto of transmutation. These arguments got their force from the fact that, when taken together, they fitted with striking nicety into the requirements of one of the two possible hypotheses about the origin of species—a hypothesis already recommended on general grounds of scientific method; while they reduced the rival hypothesis to a grotesque absurdity. "Conceivable" that other hypothesis still remained, as Huxley contended. It was, and is, possible, by making a sufficient number of supplementary suppositions, to give to the special creation doctrine a form in which it is neither explicitly self-contradictory nor explicitly in conflict with any fact established by pure induction. But when thus fitted out with the epicycles required by the facts already known to the science of 1840, the doctrine certainly presented a singularly odd and whimsical appearance. It implied that the Creator had produced the different types of organisms by fits and starts, strewing them at irregular intervals along the vast reaches of geologic time. Precisely what happened on one of these interesting occasions, the hypothesis left in a baffling obscurity; after a somewhat extensive reading in the literature of the period, I can not recall that any special creationist replied to Spencer's request for particulars on this point. Spencer wrote in 1852:

Let them tell us how a new species is constructed and how it makes its appearance. Is it thrown down from the clouds? or must we hold to the notion that it struggles up out of the ground? Do its limbs and viscera rush together