Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 10.djvu/44

20 call spirit disappears with the dissolution of the individual material combination," as another of the teachers who have risen up amongst us puts it, content to believe himself a mere accidental aggregation of particles of carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, possessing nothing the lowest animal does not share, having no future its progeny may not attain to, he treats with scorn those who attribute the wonders of creation to "the much talked of purpose in nature," to their having been, as he expresses it, "invented and constructed for his amusement by an ingenious Creator," whereas they have "in reality arisen from the aimless action of natural selection."

Whilst propounding his views about the narrow zone to which those creatures wise enough to object to being frozen withdrew, he appears to have forgotten the postulate with which he commenced; to have lost sight of the fact that this aimless action of natural selection must be deemed a myth, that the whole theory of descent, as Mr. Darwin himself says, must fall to the ground, if one fatal case is proved of a number of species having suddenly started into life all at once.

If ever any theory demanded in its fullest import the acceptance of that old canon in natural history, quoted by his great master, "Natura non facit saltum," that of the gradual progress of organic life requires it to be acknowledged as its most inexorable law—a law as immutable as that which produces the unchanging forms assumed by certain substances in the process of crystallization.

When the problem comes to be considered how life began again in isolated oceanic regions, such as New Zealand, when this terrible annus mirabilis had passed by, and the ice had retreated from the sequestered shores; those who believe in the preliminaries, in the universal ice-cap, in the scheme of the evolution of species, so ably, so seductively some may prefer to say, proposed by Mr. Darwin in his attractive pages, and so confidently asserted by his adventurous disciples, who respect no limits recognized by their master, find themselves face to face with a difficulty of which no explanation is vouchsafed.

It was difficult enough to imagine any solution that seemed to afford an escape from the dilemma those were placed in who accepted Dr. Haast's ideas regarding the pleistocene glaciation of New Zealand. He does not appear however to assume that the ice-sheet he would draw over these islands was universal over the southern hemisphere, and may consider that there were regions near where life was not extinguished, and from which their lacertian progenitors might have made their way and founded the families of the apterous birds—if such be their descent—without commencing de novo the whole process of evolution from some simple ancestor.

Accepting even the proposition of the spontaneous generation of the