But we must carefully distinguish between the Atomic Theory and the application which is here made of it.
The recent discoveries of Chemistry, by which all material compounds have been decomposed into their constituent elements, amounting to little more than fifty substances, which are either the primary or the proximate bases of all existing bodies, and the marvellous transformations which these elementary principles undergo, in respect alike of form, of density, of solidity, and of magnitude, under the action of natural laws,--may serve to make it credible that there is no _a priori_ impossibility in the assumption on which the Atomic Theory depends.

Had it been the will of God to call into being the various vegetable and animal races in the way of gradual evolution out of these primary monads, no enlightened Theist will presume to say that it was either impossible, or inconsistent with His wisdom to do so.

It must be observed, however, that the natural analogies which have sometimes been appealed to in support of this hypothesis, labor under a grievous defect when they are applied to account for the origin of the existing races, and that they are extended far beyond their legitimate limits when they are supposed to prove that these races might begin to be without any direct interposition of creative power.

For, while the oak may spring from an acorn, and the largest animal from a microscopic monad, yet within the whole range of our experience both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, _the seed is produced by the organism_, and necessarily presupposes it; whence it follows, either that there must have been an eternal succession of organisms producing seed, and thereby perpetuating the race, or if this be inconceivable, still more if it can be disproved by geological or historical evidence, then that the analogy of our present experience leads us up, not to "an infusorial point" or "microscopic monad," but to a primary living organism as the commencement of each existing tribe.

In the words of Dr.Barclay, "It will not be easy, on any principles exclusive of the vital, to answer these questions, What was the origin of the first egg, or what was the origin of the first bird?
For where is the egg that comes not from a bird, and where is the bird that comes not from an egg?
To the mere materialists, who exclude every species of vitality but that from organism, this problem is nearly as embarrassing as the origin of the Universe itself."[38] If these views be correct, all the natural analogies would lead us to acquiesce, as Dr.Barclay did, in the Mosaic narrative as the most philosophical account of the commencement of the present order of things.