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although inorganic in their constitution, yet are all capable of nutrition and accretion. By these the chasm may be said to be bridged, and the transition effected from the inorganic to the organic. As long as the contrast between inorganic and organic, lifeless and living nature, was understood as an absolute one, as long as the conception of a special vital force was retained, there was no possibility of spanning the chasm without the aid of a miracle" (The Old Faith and New, sect. 48). As devout believers in Bathybius, educated men Strauss affirmed in the name of what he mistook for German culture could no

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longer be Christians. Bathybius had expelled miracle. Thus in 1868 and 1873 Bathybius was the watchword of the acutest anti-supernaturalistic discussions, and was adopted as a victorious weapon by Strauss, when, with his dying-hand, he was using his last opportunity to equip his philosophy with armor. Men have trembled before Strauss's negation of the supernatural. Bathybius was his chief support of that denial. Huxley called his discovery Bathybius Häckelii. Ernst Häckel, well knowing what stupendous issues were at stake, elaborately applauded the discovery.

3. Great microscopists and physiologists, like Professor Lionel Beale and Dr. Carpenter, rejected Huxley's testimony on this matter of fact. Dr. Wallich, in 1869, in the Monthly Microscopical Journal, presented evidence that the deep-sea ooze has nothing in it to confirm Huxley's views. The ship Challenger, engaged now in deep-sea soundings, has accu

mulated evidence of the same sort; and at present Bathybius is a scientific myth and a by-word of derision. "Bathybius," says Professor Lionel Beale in his work on "Protoplasm" (London, 1874, pp. 110, 368, 371), which the North British Review well calls one of the most remarkable books of the age, "instead of being a widely-extending sheet of living protoplasm, which grows at the expense of inorganic elements, is rather to be regarded as a complex mass of slime, with many foreign bodies and the débris of living organisms which have passed away. Numerous minute living forms are, however, still found upon it." At the meeting of the German Naturalists' Association at Hamburg, in September, 1876, Bathybius was publicly interred. It was my fortune to converse for a while, lately, with Professor Dana of Yale College, when I put to him the question, "Does Bathybius bear the microscope?" He replied, "You know, that, in a late number of The American Journal of Science and Arts,' Huxley has withdrawn his adhesion to his theory about Bathybius." Thus the ship Challenger has challenged the assertion with which Strauss challenged the world; and Huxley himself has left Bathybius to take its place with other ghosts of not blessed memory in the history of hasty speculation.

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4. Nevertheless, in his New-York definition of the doctrine of evolution, Professor Huxley speaks of a "gelatinous mass, which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all life." As, by his own confession, no such gelatinous mass

has ever been observed, his popular assertion that our "knowledge" goes "so far" as to establish that this gelatinous mass not only exists, but is the foundation. of all life, is contradictory of his published retraction of his theory before scholars. The observed Bathybius having turned out to be a myth, its place is now occupied by an inferential Bathybius. The chasm between the inorganic and the organic was not bridged by the results of actual observation; but it must yet be bridged, even if only with a guess and a recanted theory. This substitution of the inferential for the observed is unscientific. A primary fault of Professor Huxley's latest definition of the basis of evolution is self-contradiction.

Huxley persists in his forced recantation in spite of all the alleged discoveries in the Bay of Biscay and the Adriatic. But the gelatinous mass, which, according to Huxley's New-York Lectures, is the common foundation of all life, he defined. His words permit no doubt that he meant Bathybius and its associated forms of life, as Häckel does in similar language, and not protoplasm in the minute forms in which it exists in the living tissues of to-day. Huxley affirmed in New York, that, "if we traced back the animal and vegetable world, we should find, preceding what now exists, animals and plants not identical with them, but like them, only increasing their differences as we go back in time, and at the same time becoming simpler and simpler, until finally we should arrive at the gelatinous mass, which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foun

dation of all life. The tendency of science is to justify the speculation that that also could be traced farther back, perhaps to the general nebulous condition of matter" (Tribune Pamphlet Report, p. 16). Very plainly, by this gelatinous mass, at which we should "arrive" by a process of investigation carried backward to the first living organisms and to the nebulous condition of matter, Huxley does not mean protoplasm in minute forms in the veins of the nettle, and in the other living tissues of to-day, and in them constituting what his famous lecture of a few years ago called "the physical basis of life." But he affirmed that our "knowledge," and not merely our theory, goes "so far " as to show that this gelatinous mass is "the foundation of all life.”

In view of his recantation as to this sheet of living matter beneath the seas, this assertion is self-contradictory. Since no such gelatinous mass has ever been seen, the substitution of an inferential for an observed sheet of living slime enveloping the world is unscientific. With the argument of Huxley, that of Strauss takes its place among exploded and ludi

crous errors.

5. It follows, also, from the facts now stated, that Professor Huxley's New-York Lectures are defective in omitting the most essential part of their subject; that is, in failing to explain how evolution bridges the chasm between the inorganic and the organic, or the lifeless and the living forms of matter.

6. There have been and are at least three schools of evolutionists, those who deny the Divine exist

ence, those who ignore it, and those who affirm it; or the atheistic, the agnostic, and the theistic. Carl Vogt, Buchner, and Moleschott belong to the atheistic school of evolutionists; Huxley and Tyndall and Spencer, to the agnostic; Dana, Gray, Owen, Dawson, Carpenter, Sir J. Herschell, Sir W. Thomson, and, in the judgment of Professor Gray, Darwin himself, to the theistic.

7. Of the theistic form of the doctrine of evolution, there are theoretically three varieties: (1) That which limits the supernatural action in the origination of species to the creation of a few primordial cells; (2) That which makes Divine action in the origination of species chiefly indirect, or through the agency of natural causes, and yet sometimes direct, or through special creation; (3) That which makes God immanent in all natural law, and regards every result of cosmic forces as the outcome of present Divine action.

8. In the history of the discussion of evolution, the origin of species among plants and animals has been explained by at least seven distinct hypotheses:

(1.) Self-elevation by appetency, or use and effort. That is the theory of Monboddo, Lamarck, and Cope.

(2.) Modification by the surrounding condition of the medium. That is Geoffrey St. Hillaire, Quatrefages, Draper, and Spencer.

(3.) Natural selection under the struggle for existence, with spontaneous variability, causing the survival of the fittest. That is Darwin and Häckel.

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