'"
The glorious flood of vitality, so prodigally lavished upon our world in
the beginning, has been ebbing lower and lower; and the theory of
organic nature steadily advancing from the lower to the higher is
manifestly just as puerile as the old hope of creating energy by a
perpetual-motion machine,--and a mistake of precisely the same nature.
Both are contradicted by the magnificent law of the Conservation of
Energy, which, as we have said, is only the scientific expression of the
Scriptural statement that Creation is completed, so far as our world is
concerned; though, as the "wages of sin," death has been decreed upon
the individual, and degeneration more or less marked upon every organic
type. The fossils of the past, as well as our own experience within the
historic period, confirm the view already arrived at on other grounds
that _Creation is a completed work and is not now going on_; and the
universal testimony from organic nature is that degeneration and decay
have marked the history of every living form. Just as the individual
grows old and dies, so do species degenerate and become extinct.
III
LIFE ONLY FROM LIFE
"No biological generalization rests on a wider series of observations,
or has been subjected to a more critical scrutiny, than that every
living organism has come into existence from a living portion or
portions of a pre-existing organism.
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