were introduced,
they did not work up slowly from small and weak beginnings; beginning
with dwarfs and growing up to giants; but, on the contrary, the giants
head the column. The geological books are full of them--sharks forty
feet long, frogs as big as oxen, ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus of
fabulous proportions--were not their skeletons preserved--pterodactyles,
or bats, as big as a dog, the mastodon giganteus, beside which an
ordinary modern elephant is like a Shetland pony beside a dray horse,
ferns as big as oak trees, and mosses eighteen inches in diameter, shell
fish of the nautilus order the size of dinner plates, and crustaceans,
cousins to the lobster, three feet long. And all this at the very first
start in life of these respective families, and in overwhelming
multitudes. That was no age of small beginnings, and small progressive
improvements. On the contrary, these old families, like some other old
families, seem to have rather lost rank, and bulk, and influence; at
least their modern representatives cut no such figure in the world as
their predecessors.

As we proceed along the line we meet gaps which slay the theory of
genealogical descent altogether. A gap is fatal to it. If a family dies
out, that is the end of it. You can not resuscitate it after a few
centuries, and go on with that breed; much less can you pick up a breed
quite different, and attach it to your old genealogy. But in the line of
evolution we meet these fatal gaps; and no evolutionist has bridged
them, because they can not possibly be bridged.

The first great gap is the abyss between death and life. No human power
can cross it. How could the chemical actions of dead matter infuse
vitality into the first germ, or bud of a plant? For chemical actions
are the antagonists of life, and constantly laboring to destroy the
living organism, and finally they succeed. There is no process of
evolution known to man which can carry evolution across this abyss. But
till evolution crosses this gulf it can not even begin to operate. This
first abyss is its grave.

But, supposing life begun in the plant first, as the theory requires,
there is another gap between the life of the plant and that of the
animal; for all animal life is sustained by another sort of food than
that which feeds the vegetable. The vegetable feeds solely on chemical,
unorganized matters; the animal solely on matter organized, on some
plant, or on some other animal which feeds on