# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1861_S99
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Biblical History of Creation and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation. 99

...will have explored, whereas up to now only the very smallest tracts of the earth have been examined with any thoroughness. Just as little has natural science yet explored all the seas and all parts of the mainland with respect to their present flora and fauna, so that it could name all the plants and animals now in existence. As to the difference, moreover, that generally obtains between the geological and the present flora and fauna, Wagner himself remarks, II, p. 336 f.: "Just as fancy loves to embellish the histories of long-past ages in its own way and to represent them as more grotesque, so too has it, out of the primeval remains of a vanished world, put together images that overreach the measure of reality. It has become an altogether common notion to imagine in the organic forms of the primitive world predominantly paradoxical or even gigantic shapes, and yet this opinion does not accord with the facts of the matter." Besides, it is generally acknowledged that all fossil plants and animals fall into the orders and classes of the present flora and fauna, that even as regards the genera no essential difference obtains, and that only the species are supposed to differ, either entirely or for the most part. This argument from the difference of species, held by many to be irrefutable, will probably not be able to maintain its force much longer for repeated creations of animals and plants, now that in the most recent times capable naturalists have begun to teach the formation of species as a law of nature. Thus Charles Darwin, the naturalist of the famous circumnavigating voyage of the Beagle, has recently, in the work "On the origin of Species," London, 1859, denied — on the ground of twenty years of botanical, zoological, and geological observations — the question whether a special act of creation was necessary for every single species of plant and animal, and has developed the doctrine that the capacity of nature which, under our own eyes, leads in plants and animals to the formation of races and lasting varieties, is exactly the same capacity which, in a long succession of ages, at last brings about the difference of species. And his argument is making such a stir in England that naturalists such as Lyell and Owen refer to this work, and in the critical reports of the English papers about it only the one opinion has so far prevailed — that Darwin's book will probably bring about as immense a revolution in the natural-historical sciences as Sir Charles Lyell's appearance did for geology. It is quite remarkable, too, that the zoologist Wallace has sent in, from the Philippines, to the assembly of British naturalists a paper that agrees strictly with Darwin's views, although the two scholars arrived at their propositions quite independently of one another. Finally, the "Ausland" of 1860, No. 11, p. 255 f., mentions, after reports from Chamber's Journal, a work by Dr. J. D. Hooker (the flora of Australia, its origin, affinities and distribution), which aims to accomplish for botany what Darwin and Wallace have done for zoology, namely