varying the food, the circumstances of life and so forth, and by
selective breeding.

The contention then is: given certain original simple forms of life,
probably marine or aquatic--for it is in the water that the most likely
occur--these will gradually change and vary, some in one direction, some
in another; that the changes go on increasing, each creature giving
birth to offspring which exhibits the stored-up results of change, till
the varied and finished forms--some reptile, some bird, some
animal--which we now see around us, have been produced. And at last man
himself was developed in the same way. All this, observe, is by the
action of just such ordinary and natural causes as we now see operating
around us--changes in food and in climate, changes in one part requiring
a corresponding change in others, and so on.


[Footnote 1: The reader may find this admirably put in Wallace,
"Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection," p. 302.]

Nature contains no sharply drawn lines. Plants are different from
animals; but there are animals so low down in the scale of life that it
is difficult to distinguish them from plants. Pigeons are distinct from
pheasants, but the line at which the one species ends and the other
begins is difficult to draw. This fact seems to invite some theory of
one form changing into other. Accordingly the evolutionist explains the
working of the process which he asserts to be sufficient to produce all
the various forms of life in our globe.

After stating this more in detail than we have previously done, we shall
be in a better position to judge if the process (which in the main we