here they were born, and where they begot their
progeny. The geological strata ought to be full of connecting links.

But when we come to look for them they are not there. Geology knows
nothing about them. It has plenty of distinct, well-defined
species--trilobites, and ammonites, and echinoderms, palms, ferns, firs,
and mosses, all sorts of quadrupeds from a mouse to a mastodon, and all
just as clean-cut and well-defined as the species of existing animals.
Mr. Darwin can not find his connecting links between the species, which
ought to have been a hundred times more plentiful than the species they
connected. These connecting links are missing links. He ought to be able
to overwhelm his opponents, and bury them under mountains of the bones
of intermediate species. But all his friends can do is to suggest about
half a dozen, while he needs three hundred thousand. He can not pay half
a cent on the dollar. In his grief he turns round and abuses the
defectiveness of the geological record, which he says he could never
have suspected of being so defective but for this failure to meet his
drafts. But he need not blame the geological record for not preserving
bones of animals which never lived. Geology says there never was any
such confusion of species as evolution asserts.

But not only does the general structure of the web of nature present a
clearly striped pattern, instead of the mottled gray of the
theory--neither the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end is like what
the evolution theory would produce.

The gradation does not begin, as the theory asserts and demands, with
the monads. On the contrary, we find that there are four kingdoms of
animal life--in an ascending scale--the radiate, or starfish; the
mollusk or oyster; the articulate, or insect; and the vertebrate, or
animals with backbones. Now the evolution ought to have begun at the
bottom, with the radiate, the coral, and the starfish; it should have
gone upward, the coral developing into the oyster, and the oyster into
the lobster, and the lobster into the salmon, and so on. But instead of
that we discover, away down in the Silurian strata, at the very
beginning of life, _all the four kingdoms_--the radiates, the mollusks,
the articulates, and the fish! Evidently, then, there was no such
beginning of the world as evolutionists suppose.

Then as we work upward along the line of march, and of the development
of the divine idea, we observe that when new species