A formless, apparently diffluent and structureless mass is seen to exhibit the essential phenomena of life, -to move, to feed, to grow, to multiply.
But it was soon ascertained that this quaternary matter of the animal body was chemically the same in the plant, was elaborated there, and only appropriated by the animal.
Even the most advanced of the views here presented are held by very many scientific men, -some as established truths, some as probable opinions.
For its fundamental note is, the declaration of one God, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible, -a declaration which, if physical science is unable to establish, it is equally unable to overthrow.
Frankness is always commendable; but outspokenness upon delicate and unsettled problems, in the ground of which, cherished convictions are rooted, ought to be tempered with consideration.
I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.
I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it.
I know some people who never have any difficulties to speak of. The moment I understood your premisses, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on.
I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.
I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.
I trust that the veneration rightly due to the Old Testament is not impaired by the ascertaining that the Mosaic is not an original but a compiled cosmogony.
In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop.
Increased powers of investigation- microscopical and chemical- might be expected to discover them. This expectation has not been fulfilled.
Indeed upon much that may have to say, I expect rather the charitable judgment than the full assent of those whose approbation I could most wish to win.
Is it philosophical, is it quite allowable, to assume without evidence from fossil plants that the family or any of the genera was once larger and wide spread? and occupied a continuous area?
It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order.
It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.
It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.
It was known to be structure-building material for animals: it was not known to be essential plant-structure also.
Its glory is, that while its materials were the earlier property of the race, they were in this record purged of polytheism and Nature- worship, and impregnated with ideas which we w suppose the world will never outgrow.
Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.
Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.
One need not be an old man to know that Laplace was accounted an atheist because he developed the nebular hypothesis, and because of his remark that he had no need to postulate a Creator for the mathematical discussion of a physical theorem.
Our predecessors implicitly held that Holy Scripture must somehow truly teach such natural science as it had occasion to refer to, or at least could never contradict it; while the most that is now intelligently claimed is, that the teachings of the, two, properly understood, are not incompatible.
The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.
The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.
The natural history of protoplasm enables me to proceed to other evidences of the substantial oneness of the two kingdoms of organic nature.
The only objection to the latter is (that the definition of this tertium quid from plant on the one hand and animal on the other is equally impracticable.
The plant substance, named cellulose, because it formed the cell-walls, was supposed to constitute the whole vegetable fabric.
There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.
This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.
Upon no one of these particular points has there been a completer change of view than upon the distinctness of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.
We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.
Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?
You ask a layman to speak from this desk because you would have a layman's thoughts, expressed from a layman's point of view; because you would know what a naturalist comes to think upon matters of common interest.
Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present.
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