tated that plants, for example, made their appearance upon the third day,
and not before. And you will understand that what the poet means by plants
are such plants as now live, the ancestors, in the ordinary way of
propagation of like by like, of the trees and shrubs which flourish in the
present world. It must needs be so: for, if they were different, either
the existing plants have been the result of a separate origination since
that described by Milton, of which we have no record, or any ground for
supposition that such an occurrence has taken place; or else they have
arisen by a process of evolution from the original stocks.
In the second place, it is clear that there was no animal life before the
fifth day, and that, on the fifth day, aquatic animals and birds appeared.
And it is further clear that terrestrial living things, other than birds,
made their appearance upon the sixth day, and not before. Hence, it
follows that if, in the large mass of circumstantial evidence as to what
really has happened in the past history of the globe we find indications
of the existence of terrestrial animals, other than birds, at a certain
period, it is perfectly certain that all that has taken place since that
time must be referred to the sixth day.
In the great Carboniferous formation, whence America derives so vast a
proportion of her actual and potential wealth, in the beds of coal which
have been formed from the vegetation of that period, we find abundant
evidence of the existence of terrestrial animals. They have been
described, not only by European but by American naturalists. There are to
be found numerous insects allied to our cockroaches. There are to be found
spiders and scorpions of large size, the latter so similar to existing
scorpions that it requires the practised eye of the naturalist to
distinguish them. Inasmuch as these animals can be proved to have been
alive in the Carboniferous epoch, it is perfectly clear that, if the
Miltonic account is to be accepted, the huge mass of rocks extending from
the middle of the Palaeozoic formations to the uppermost members of the
series must belong to the day which is termed by Milton the sixth.
But, further, it is expressly stated that aquatic animals took their
origin upon the fifth day, and not before; hence, all formations in which
remains of aquatic animals can be proved to exist, and which therefore
testify that such animals lived at the time when these formations we
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