stigator is able to trace one unbroken thread
of thought from the beginning to the present hour.

[Illustration: SKELETON OF ANIMAL OF THE MIOCENE PERIOD.]

[Illustration: SKELETON OF ANIMAL OF THE PLIOCENE PERIOD.]

The tree is known by its fruits,--and the fruits of chance are
incoherence, incompleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of
blind, unreasoning force. A coherence that binds all the geological
ages in one chain, a stability of purpose that completes in the beings
born to-day an intention expressed in the first creatures that swam in
the Silurian ocean or crept upon its shores, a steadfastness of
thought, practically recognized by man, if not acknowledged by him,
whenever he traces the intelligent connection between the facts of
Nature and combines them into what he is pleased to call his system of
Geology, or Zooelogy, or Botany,--these things are not the fruits of
chance or of an unreasoning force, but the legitimate results of
intellectual power. There is a singular lack of logic, as it seems to
me, in the views of the materialistic naturalists. While they consider
classification, or, in other words, their expression of the relations
between animals or between physical facts of any kind, as the work of
their intelligence, they believe the relations themselves to be the
work of physical causes. The more direct inference surely is, that, if
it requires an intelligent mind to recognize them, it must have
required an intelligent mind to establish them. These relations
existed before man was created; they have existed ever since the
beginning of time; hence, what we call the classification of facts is
not the work of his mind in any direct original sense, but the
recognition of an intelligent action prior to his own existence.

There is, perhaps, no part of the world, certainly none familiar to
science, where the early geological periods can be studied with so
much ease and precision as in the United States. Along their northern
borders, between Canada and the United States, there runs the low line
of hills known as the Laurentian Hills. Insignificant in height,
nowhere rising more than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet above
the level of the sea, these are nevertheless the first mountains that
broke the uniform level of the earth's surface and lifted themselves
above the waters. Their low stature, as compared with that of other
more lofty mountain-ranges, is in accordance with an invariable rul