The office of a preface is twofold; first, to introduce the author to the public; second, to introduce his work. As the writer seeks no personal introduction, beyond what a favorable or unfavorable reception of his work may give him, he leaves the more formal, if not formidable branch of salutation untouched.

The work has cost him some labor, as the reader will see. The field he has traversed is vast and varied, and the facts he has gathered are numerous and from many and diversified sources--all bearing more or less conclusively on the one vital point he seeks to establish, viz: That the primordial germs (meaning germinal principles of life) of all living things, man alone excepted, are in themselves upon the earth, and that they severally make their appearance, each after its kind, whenever and wherever the necessary environing conditions exist.

The foundation of this emphatic formula we find in the Bible Genesis, in the words given on our title-page, which are more accurately translated in the Septuagint, than in our common English version of the Old Testament. The words are to be found in the 11th verse of the first chapter of Genesis, and the writer confidently believes that they contain the true Genesis of Life, although entirely overlooked, heretofore, by both the biblical and scientific scholar.

In the work which he here gives to the public, he will endeavor to show that all the vital phenomena of our globe, with the single exception named, find their complete explication in this Genesis of Life; and that we have only to take the scientific Genesis out of some of its more imposing categories, to make the two either entirely harmonize, or fall into the same lines of incidence in human thought.

Science has long taught that the absence of necessary physiological conditions results everywhere in the disappearance of vital phenomena; by reversing its logical methods, it will also find that the presence of these necessary conditions results everywhere in the appearance of vital phenomena. Take, for instance, the vegetation of Northern Europe, where it is known that the oak succeeded the pine, and the beech the oak, after each had held possession of the soil for we know not how many thousand years. In bringing about the necessary conditions of soil, the pine paved the way for the oak, and that in turn paved the way for the beech. Neither sprang from the other, nor did the "selection of the fittest" have anything to do with the appearance or disappearance of either. Each yielded fruit "after his kind," whose "seed" (germinal principle of life) was in itself, i.e., after its own kind, upon the earth, and made its appearance spontaneously,--that is, without the presence of natural seed,--whenever the necessary environing conditions favored.

And the same law of vegetal propagation is everywhere operative to-day, in the alternations of forest growths, the spontaneous appearance of oak forests where pine have been cleared away, and vice versa, in some parts of the country, where heavy forests of oak timber have been felled. So with the new growths of timber springing up in the paths of tornadoes, over large burnt districts, in soils brought up from below the last glacial drift, and in hundreds of other instances which the reader will find conclusively verified in these pages,--all making their appearance without the possible intervention of natural seeds.

The great value of the Septuagint, as compared with other versions of the Hebrew Bible, will appear from the fact that it is older by many hundred years than any manuscript copy of the Hebrew text now extant. It was undoubtedly translated at Alexandria, in Egypt, as early as the third century before Christ, while the oldest known Hebrew MS. is a Pentateuch roll dating no further back than A. D. 580. Its translators had before them much older and more perfect MSS. than any that survived to the time of the masoretic recension, when an attempt was made to give uniformity to the readings and renderings of the Hebrew text by means of the vowel points, diacritical signs, terminal letters, etc., all of which are now subject to rejection by the best Oriental scholarship.

According to IrenÆus, this Greek version was rendered at the request of Ptolemy Lagi, in order to add to the treasures of the Alexandrian library, and it no doubt derived its name from the number of Hebrew and Hellenistic scholars,--probably the most eminent to be found in that day,--employed upon the work. The version comes, therefore, with paramount authority to our own times; and we accept its Greek rendering as the highest and most conclusive evidence of the authenticity of the text, and the "new genesis of life" we derive therefrom.

Σπέρμα (as contained in the Septuagint) has almost an identical signification with the Hebrew word ZRA. It means the "germ of anything," or the "germinal principle of life," as contained in anything that lives or grows. No one will claim that it is used in its literal sense of "seed," in the text. For, when the divine command was issued, there was no plant or tree, and, presumably, had been none upon the earth from which seed could have been derived. The word was used in its larger and more comprehensive (that is, metaphorical) sense, as the "germinal principle of life in matter," or precisely in the sense in which the Greek stoics used it in their philosophy. Both Theophrastus and Diogenes use the terms σπερματ´κοὶ γόγοι expressing "the laws of generation contained in matter"--precisely the meaning we attach to it in its textual connection. The eleventh verse should read, therefore, as follows: "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose germinal principle of life, each in itself after its kind, is upon the earth"

We accept this rendering of "the seventy," because they had the most complete and perfect Hebrew MSS. before them, and were no doubt better scholars, and far more competent renderers of the original text than the Masorites who came some seven or eight hundred years after them.

But this is not the most important point of inquiry in this connection. The materialistic objector may say: "Admit all this; grant that the true rendering is here given; grant even that the true law of vegetal development and growth is here enunciated; what has 'star-eyed science' to do with the 'odium theologicum?'" We answer, nothing. We would bury both theological rancor and atheistical pretension in the same barrow, and agree never to "peep and botanize" over their common grave. But if a great scientific principle--one that fits into all the phenomenal facts of nature--explains them all, and is, in turn, explained by them--be found in the Hebrew Hagiographa, of what less value is it to science than if it had been originally enunciated by Aristotle or Plato? Or--to make the inquiry still sharper and more emphatic--of what less value is it to science than if it had originally come from Professor Tyndall or Mr. Herbert Spencer?

Take the "biblical genesis" as we have enunciated and explained it--with all the facts crowded into these explanatory pages--and science has no longer any genetic mystery to brood over, further than that every operation of nature is a mystery into which it is useless for scientific speculation to pry. We know what nature does, or may know it by the proper scrutiny, but we shall never know the causes of things, any more than we shall find God at the bottom of Herbert Spencer's crucible, or at the top of his ladder of synthesis. In the light of the Bible genesis, science can account for the origin of the stalwart oak or the lordly pine, without going back to any mycological or cryptogamic forms, to follow down an ever-changing vital plexus that is as likely to land in a buttonwood tree as an oak, or in a hemlock as a pine,--in fact, quite as likely to land in a carnivorous animal as in an insectivorous plant. "Let the earth bring forth," is still the eternal fiat,--just as implicitly obeyed to-day as it was in the world's primeval history, when an exuberance of endogenous vegetation laid the foundation of the coal measures. It requires no greater effort on the part of nature to produce the pine, the oak, the beech, the hickory--all of which we see springing directly from primordial germs to-day--than it did to produce the lowest vegetal organism, from an invisible, indestructible "vital unit," or Darwinian gemmule, thousands of years ago.

He who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and in whose sight a thousand years are but as yesterday, knows no such "law of variability" as our materialistic friends have been spinning for us in their unverified theories of evolution, natural selection, selection of the fittest, rejection of the unfit--force-correlations, molecular machinery, transmutation of physical forces, differentiation, dynamical aggregates, molÉcules organiques, potentiated sky-mist, undifferentiated "life-stuff," and other hylotheistic and purely hypothetical formulÆ, with which the average mind has been well-nigh crazed for the last fifteen or twenty years.

Believing that the time has come to call for "a halt" in scientific speculations, and a return to the phenomenal facts of nature as the true and only basis on which to formulate the immutable laws of life, matter, motion, etc., the writer submits this volume with trustful confidence to the public. [1]

R. W. Wright.

West Cheshire, Conn.

True Genesis.