Page:The Philosophy of Creation.djvu/28

 and suited to the promotion of use. Similarity of organic structure and an ascending scale of created forms accord with the vast and underlying laws of creation, but in no way do they argue that a specific form is used as a progenitor of the next higher.

Not only are hybrids nonprolific, but they are inferior to the progenitor. Nature herself regards Evolution as a monstrosity, and she quickly concentrates her forces to consummate its possibility by sterility in the hybrid. If the larva produces the butterfly, the butterfly returns in genesis to the larva. It travels its circle, but never passes out of it. Everywhere nature sets bounds, though elastic yet finally impassable, to preserve her order. This is in fulfilment of a law universally illustrated and without exception, the law of "the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind."

It was thought that the microscope would reveal the process of evolution still going on among the minute inhabitants of the dust and of the stagnant drop; but there likewise nature is true to herself. If the agamogenetic produce the gamogenetic, in the order of nature agamogenesis succeeds. A moneron produces a moneron; a