This is probably the most complete transmutation of species which has ever been imagined or described.

The evolution of bread into Deity is only equaled by Mr.Tyndall's endowment of matter with all the potencies of life and thought; a miracle differing from the popish transubstantiation only in the element of time, but in its essential nature equally supernatural.

The dogma excited great discussion for centuries, and produced as many theories of transubstantiation as we now observe of evolution, keeping philosophic minds and pens busy till the dawn of modern science after the Reformation.
La Place threw out the Nebular Hypothesis, which is substantially Democritus' concourse of atoms, only La Place endeavored to substitute circular motions under the law of gravitation, instead of Democritus' chance arrangement, as a sufficient cause for the formation and motions of planets.

Herschel's discovery of the nebulae was hastily laid hold of by a number of writers, and notably by the author of the Vestiges of Creation, as furnishing the primeval matter necessary for world-making; and till the spectroscopic discoveries of the composite nature of gaseous nebulae, they were claimed as specimens of worlds in process of formation.

La Place supposed his nebulous matter to be gas in a state of white-heat combustion, compared with which the heat of the hottest fire would be a cool bath.