old ages, forced their way through the tangled branches;
and the British tiger and hyena harbored in their thickets. Cuvier
framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds
and beasts of the catacombs were identical in every respect with the
animals of the same kind that live now. But what, it has been asked, is
a brief period of 3,000 years, when compared with the geologic ages? Or
how could any such argument be founded on a basis so little extended? It
is, however, to no such narrow basis that we can refer in the case of
these woods. All human history is comprised in the nearer corner of the
immense period they measure out; and yet from their first appearance in
creation till now, they have not altered a single fiber. And such on
this point is the invariable testimony of Paleontologic science,
testimony so invariable that no great Paleontologist was ever yet an
asserter of the Development Hypothesis."[18] To the same purpose let us
hear Huxley's testimony, since no one will suspect him of undue respect
for Moses: "Obviously if the earliest fossiliferous rocks now known are
coeval with the commencement of life, and if their contents give us any
just conception of the earliest fauna and flora, the insignificant
amount of modification which can be demonstrated to have taken place in
any one group of animals and plants, is quite incompatible with the
hypothesis that all living forms are the results of a process of
necessary progressive development entirely comprised within the time
represented by the fossiliferous rocks."[19]

We are fully warranted, then, in alleging, that no such transmutation of
species is known to science, as an existing fact, or as having ever
occurred.

As to the supposition on which the evolutionists fall back, that such a
miracle might have happened thousands of millions of years before the
formation of the lowest rocks known to us, we might well decline the
discussion of may-be's as facts of science.

But there is a positive denial of unimaginable periods of time for Mr.
Darwin's evolution to try its blundering experiments. We are empowered
to say positively, No! There is no such length of time for you, Mr.
Darwin, on this little globe at least. This rotating world had a
beginning; so had our moon; and our sun, too, began to burn one day. And
there are data of the revolution of these bodies, and of the secular
cooling of the earth, and of the gradual combustion of the sun