Scientific Sophisms: A Review of Current Theories Concerning Atoms, Apes and MenHodder and Stoughton, 1881 - 310 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
accept actual Address admit animal answer appears assertion atoms authority become beginning believe bodies called carbonic cause cell CHAPTER chemical chemistry complex compounds conception conclusion consciousness creation Darwin David Brewster dead demonstrable derived distinct doctrine doubt Edition elements equally evidence Evolution existence fact forces forms Fortnightly given Haeckel human hypothesis identical imagination inorganic instance intellectual kind knowledge laws least less living living matter Materialism matter means merely mind modification molecules Monera nature never observation once organic Origin of Species period phenomena physical plants possessed possible present probably produced Prof Professor Huxley Professor Tyndall progression proof properties protoplasm prove question reason regarded relation result Review says scientific selection simple spontaneous structure substance suppose tells theory thing thought tion true truth universe vegetable views vitality whole
Popular passages
Page 148 - Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet — Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
Page 15 - There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.
Page 46 - He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.
Page 15 - It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth...
Page 16 - I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modification embraces all the members of the same great class or kingdom. I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.
Page 20 - A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has "gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.
Page 30 - But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man may recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter.
Page 199 - None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule.
Page 70 - At all events, no line has ever been drawn between the conscious and the unconscious ; for the vegetable shades into the animal by such fine gradations, that it is impossible to say where the one ends and the other begins.
Page 91 - By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.