These authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth.

But do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues?
Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced?
Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown?
and in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb?
Undoubtedly some of these same questions cannot be answered by those who believe in the appearance or creation of only a few forms of life or of some one form alone.

It has been maintained by several authors that it is as easy to believe in the creation of a million beings as of one; but Maupertuis' philosophical axiom "of least action" leads the mind more willingly to admit the smaller number; and certainly we ought not to believe that innumerable beings within each great class have been created with plain, but deceptive, marks of descent from a single parent.
As a record of a former state of things, I have retained in the foregoing paragraphs, and elsewhere, several sentences which imply that naturalists believe in the separate creation of each species; and I have been much censured for having thus expressed myself.

But undoubtedly this was the general belief when the first edition of the present work appeared.

I formerly spoke to very many naturalists on the subject of evolution, and never once met with any sympathetic agreement.