It may be, that further evidence will be forth coming to establish as a fact that man was an inhabitant of the earth at a period anterior to the assigned date of Adam's birth ; but it is satisfac tory to know that, even in that event, the truth of the Scripture record could be vindicated. It has been ably argued in a recent work, The Genesis of the Earth ana' Man, that the existence of a pre Adamite race of human beings is not inconsistent with the sacred narrative of the birth of Adam and the history of his descendants. There are some passages in the Bible which rather imply the exist ence of human beings, not the offspring of Adam, such as the apprehension expressed by Cain of violence at the hands of those amongst whom he should become a fugitive when cast out from asso ciation with his own family. On the other hand, there are expressions to be found in the Scriptures, which apparently indicate the origination of all mankind from Adam. The meaning and purport of these passages have been discussed with ability in the foregoing work ; and the author concludes that the Scripture evidence is strong in favour of the existence of a non-Adamic race both before and after the flood. From ethnology he finds that the varieties of the human species may be reduced to two stocks, but that to reduce it to one is scarcely possible. History, too, records the traditions of every civilized race, that a barbarous race was ex pelled or subdued by their ancestors ; and, on philological grounds, he concludes that many languages exhibit traces of two sources of hu man speech. The subject is worthy of attention, and ought to be entertained and discussed, in a spirit of candour and forbearance, by those who are qualified to deal with it on philosophical and philological principles ; for on this ground the Re ligionist may yet have to fight the battle of the evidences of Scripture inspiration.
The origin of the material world, or of that rocky framework of the globe, the abode of man and his associated animals and plants, can be traced back to a period when the now solid crust on which we stand formed a portion of a revolving mass of igne ous matter ; and with the aid of geological, chemi cal, and other physical sciences, we can follow it through its various vicissitudes since that time, and see how that, by the gradual operation of the ascertained laws of matter, the earth has assumed its present form and appearance. Cause and effect are adequate to explain the process by which chaotic matter has become a structure that pro claims the wisdom and goodness of the Omnipo tent architect and builder, and a storehouse of the manifold wonders of nature and art with which we are surrounded. The constancy of the union be tween cause and effect, in the estimation of one class of minds, is never separated from the exist ence of a sustaining and omnipotent intelligent power, by whom it was ordained that one should invariably follow the other ; while to another class of reasoner;, this consistency of Nature's law sug gests an argument against the sustained efficient presence of the author of that law. As regards
the process by which the material world has passed through its various phases to its present aspect, there has been little or no discussion arising out of these two modes of viewing the relations between God and his works; but the origin of life, or of the various species of animal and vegetable organisms, the receptacles of life, is a subject on which there has been much speculation, involving the principle of the continued efficient presence of the Deity with the onward march of vitality on our planet.
Each animal and plant has an ancestry of its own ; and relationship by descent is admittedly that which constitutes identity of species—that is to say, all the animals of the world (and the same may be said of plants) which have descended from the same pair of ancestors belong to the same species. That there are many apparently different species of animals now in existence is obvious. But the question has been mooted, whether this distinction of species is a reality in nature, or whe ther all animals may not be lineally descended from one, or, at all events, a few original stocks. Geo logy teaches us that no animals of a higher order than zoophytes, mollusks, and crustaceans were in habitants of our globe up to the close of the Silurian era ; that the fish then, for the first time, made its appearance, and afterwards the reptile, in the Carboniferous era, and then the mammal, at a later period, in the Tertiary. Were the different species of zoophytes, mollusks, and crustaceans of the Silurian ages, and those of the succeeding and present eras, all of them the offspring of one pair, or of different pairs of ancestors, whose descendants had become thus varied by the operation of time and the changed conditions of life ? Again, were the various species of fishes, reptiles, and mammals, descendants from their severally respective pairs of ancestors, or were they all of them lineal descen dants of the previously existing inferior orders of animals of the Silurian and its preceding eras, and all thus related in blood to each other ? If the various species had each their own separate first parents and lipeage, then each of those ancestors must have been produced by a separate act of creative powers, or, as it has been termed, by a separate creative fiat, similar to that which kindled the first spark of life in the first living creature that stirred within the precincts of our planet ; and thus the Creator must have been ever present with his work, renewing it with life in the various species of animals and plants with which it has from the beginning been supplied. On the other hand, philosophers have been found to insist that all the animals (and plants also) in the world, including man himself, have descended from one simple organism, and the operation of the pre-ordained laws of nature, without the interference of the Deity.