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Show • 98 PARTICULAR CONSIDERATIONS ON THE yvas, or, at t~1e be.st i~terpreted in a thousand wrong ways In contorm1ty With Ideas already familiar. The ex 1eriments above described, findino- a public mind w hich1 had . 0 never discovered a fact or conceived an idea at all analo-gous, wer~, o~ course, ungraciously received. It was held to be Impwus, even to surmise that animals could have bee~ formed through any instrumentality of an apparatns devised by human skill. The more likely account of the phenomena was said to be, that the insects were only developed from ova, resting either in the fluid, or in the wooden frame on which the experiments took place. ?n these obj~ction.s. the. follo~ing remarks may be made. fhe supposition of Impiety anses frum an entire nlisconception of what is implied by an aborio-inal creation of insects. The experimentalist could ne~er be con~idered as the author of the existence of these creatures except by the most unreasoning ignorance. The uhnost that can be claimed for, or imputed to him, is, that he arrano-ed the natural conditions under which the true creative energy-that of the Divine Author of all thinO's-was pleased to \Vork in that instance. On the hypothe~is here brou~ht f~rward, the ~ca~us C1·ossii was a type of being ordained from the beginning, and destined to be realized nnder certain physical conditions. When a hurnan hand b~·ought these. conditions into the proper arrangement, it did an act akin to hundreds of familiar ones which we execute every day, and which are followed by natural results; but it did nothing more. The production of the insect if it did ~ake pl~ce as ass~med, was as clearly an act of the Aln11ghty himself, as 1f he had fashioned it with ha~ds. .For the presumption that an act of aboriginal creatwn did take place, there is this to be said that, in Mr .. Weekes's experiment, every care that ingenuity could / devise was tal~en to e~clude the possibility of a development of the Insects from ova. The '"ood of the frame was baked in a powerful heat; a bell-shaped glass cover-ed the apparatus, and from this the atmosphere was excluded by the constantly rising fumes fi·om the liquid, for the emi~sion of which there was an aperture so arranged at the top of the glass, that only these fumes could pass. The water was distille(l, and the substance of the silicata had been subjected to white heat. Thus every source oJ fallacy seemed to be shut up. 1n such circumstances, a candid mind, which sees nothing either impious 0r unphi .. ' ORIGIN OF THE ANIMATED TRIBES iosophical in the idea of a new creation, will be disposed lo think that there is less difficulty in believing in such a creation havi11g actually taken place, than in bel teving that, in two instances separated in place and time, exactly the same insects should have chanced to arise from concealed ova, and these a species herttofc.·re unknown. HYPOTHESIS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE VEGET ABL.It .AND ANIMAL KINGDOMS. IT has been already intimated, as a general fact, that there is an obvious gradation among the families of both the vegetable and animal kingdomR, from the simple lichen and anirnalcule respectively up to the highest order of dicotyledonous trees and the mammalia. Confining our attention, in the tneantime, to the animal kingdomit does not appear that this gradation passes along one line, on which every form of life can be, as it were, strung; there may be branching or double lines at some places, or the whole may be in a circle composed ot minor circles, as has been recently suggested. But still it is incontestable that there are general appearances of a scale beginning with the simple and advancing to the complicated. The animal kingdom was divided by Cuvier into four sub-kingdoms, or divisions, and these exhibit an unequivocal gradation in the oTder in which they are here enumerated: Radiata (polypes, &c.;) mollusca (pulpy animals;) articulata (jointed animals;) vertebrata (animals v1ith internal skeleton.) The gradation can, in like manner, be clearly traced in the classes into which the sub-kingdoms are subdivided, as, for instance, when we take those of the vertebrata in this order-reptiles, fishes, birds, mammals. While the external forms of all these various animals are so different, it is very remarkable that the whole are, after all, variations of a fundamental plan, which can be traced as a basis throughout the whole, the variations belng merely modifications of that plan to suit the particuw lar conditions in which each particular animal has been designed to live. Starting from the primeval germ, which as we have seen, is the representative of a particular order |