he
supposed necessity of making science accord with the Hebrew cosmogony;
but it is curious to observe that, as the doctrine is at present
maintained by men of science, it is as hopelessly inconsistent with the
Hebrew view as any other hypothesis.

If there be any result which has come more clearly out of geological
investigation than another, it is, that the vast series of extinct
animals and plants is not divisible, as it was once supposed to be, into
distinct groups, separated by sharply marked boundaries. There are no
great gulfs between epochs and formations--no successive periods marked
by the appearance of plants, of water animals, and of land animals, _en
masse_. Every year adds to the list of links between what the older
geologists supposed to be widely separated epochs: witness the crags
linking the drift with the older tertiaries; the Maestricht beds linking
the tertiaries with the chalk; the St. Cassian beds exhibiting an
abundant fauna of mixed mesozoic and palaeozoic types, in rocks of an
epoch once supposed to be eminently poor in life; witness, lastly, the
incessant disputes as to whether a given stratum shall be reckoned
devonian or carboniferous, silurian or devonian, cambrian or silurian.

This truth is further illustrated in a most interesting manner by the
impartial and highly competent testimony of M. Pictet, from whose
calculations of what percentage of the genera of animals, existing in
any formation, lived during the preceding formation, it results that in
no case is the proportion less than _one-third_, or 33 per cent. It is
the triassic formation, or the commencement of the mesozoic epoch, which
has received this smallest inheritance from preceding ages. The other
formations not uncommonly exhibit 60, 80, or even 94 per cent. of genera
in common with those whose remains are imbedded in their predecessor.
Not only is this true, but the subdivisions of each formation exhibit
new species characteristic of, and found only in, them; and, in many
cases, as in the lias for example, the separate beds of these
subdivisions are distinguished by well-marked and peculiar forms of
life. A section, a hundred feet thick, will exhibit, at different
heights, a dozen species of ammonite, none of which passes beyond its
particular zone of limestone, or clay, into the zone below it or into
that above it; so that those who adopt the doctrine of special creation
must be prepared to admit that at intervals of time,