When “the waters were divided from the waters” and they were called “seas,” the level at which they were allowed to rest, being determined, has ever since remained immutably fixed. With the land, however, it is very different; its elevation above the sea, and consequent outline, has varied from the very moment it “appeared” or in other words arose from beneath the “waters,” and each successive geological era comprised within itself countless changes in this relative distribution of Land and Water, and many marked variations in the climatal agencies effecting the one, and in the tides and currents which sorted the shingle, sands, and finer sediments formed by the other. If proof of the truth of this be required we have but to pause before any bed of conglomerate, in any strata from the lowest to the most recent, and we have there presented to us a clear evidence of a period of local destruction in rocks previously formed and consolidated, and a consequent reproduction out of their disintegrated masses; but should we find in that conglomerate a block of a still older conglomerate, and this, on examination, was found to contain pebbles derived from ancient fossiliferous rocks in which we discover the remains of shells and corals, we clearly see that the process of formation, consolidation, destruction and reproduction has been going on during countless ages before the formation of the conglomerate we first examined.

It would be an insult to reason to deny the power of the Omnipotent to create at once plants and animals out of inorganic or any kind of matter: on the other hand, it would be equally irrational to doubt His power to ordain and sustain laws, through the instrumentality of which originally created organisms could be modified and adapted to external changes. The two modes may be designated,—the first, Autotheogeny,—and the second, Genetheonomy.

I hold that an organism, whether it typifies a species, a genus, a family, an order, or a class, is an autotheogen, if it possesses a set of characters which isolate it from other equivalent groups; also, that such an organism, through being acted on by inherent and external forces, may become more or less modified, thereby resulting in genetheonomous forms. I see no reason why Mr. Darwin should not admit the same, notwithstanding that his present belief merely recognizes among animals “at most only four or five” autotheogenous roots of apparently as many classes. On psychological grounds alone, Man must be regarded as isolated from all other organisms; hence I consider him to be an autotheogenous species.