On these matters the theory remained judiciously non-committal. But it maintained, at all events, that the vast majority of species, however created, were destined to be in turn destroyed—and destroyed by the operation of natural forces. The Great Artificer could fashion, but he was either unable or unwilling to protect, the creatures his imagination had devised. When ordinary physical processes were too much for them, sweeping them off by groups, or even, according to the favorite variant of the theory, obliterating them altogether, he was obliged to start afresh; whether this happened four or twelve or twenty-seven or thirty thousand times was a detail about which the partisans of the doctrine could not agree. The forms thus later produced did not always differ markedly for the better from their unfortunate precursors; many primitive and rather unsuccessful models continued to be repeated. But in general, as time went on, the Creator brought both more diverse and more complicated beings into existence. In doing so, he behaved after the manner of a lazy and incompetent architect, who, instead of "studying" each problem afresh, with reference to the special uses and situation of the edifice to be erected, is content to make a few minor alterations in a single conventionalized plan. The "unity of type" of organisms destined to the most dissimilar modes of existence was generally dilated upon with devout enthusiasm by the special creationists. They seem to have regarded it as an agreeable mannerism of the Creator's personal style. But it is the kind of mannerism which, in a human designer, is commonly ascribed to indolence or limited intelligence. Indeed, the parallel of the lazy architect was inadequate to represent the whole singularity of the Creator's mode of construction. He not only used as few general models as possible, but he also—when, with a cleared field, he created a fresh group of organisms—reproduced in them organs and members which had been functional and useful in their predecessors, but were with the new species useless, meaningless, and even disadvantageous—like the proverbial Chinese tailor, who laboriously imitates all the rents and stains in the discarded European garment given him as a model. Finally, the Creator was supposed to have implanted in all organisms the senseless habit of mimicking, in the embryonic stages of the individual's development, the forms of other and extinct organisms to which that individual bore no relation of kinship.
Such—with the details absolutely required by the accepted scientific knowledge of the time—was the hypothesis tenaciously held by most men of science for at least twenty years before 1859. With the greater number of them the motives for holding it were primarily theological; yet the thing that now impresses us in the theory is its extraordinarily irreligious, not to say blasphemous, character. Science
