and the primeval germ, whatever it was, could hardly be less fertile, since fertility increases with simplicity of structure. But, taking 8,000,000 to begin with, here were as many varieties; since no two of them, or of any creature, could be exactly alike. The next generation would give 8,000,000 times as many varieties, and so on till Natural Selection began to thin off the feeble. But here we have, instead of a few well-marked varieties, an infinite multitude of imperceptible variations, rendering classification impossible. And as all these were only varieties of the same breed, they would breed together, and thus still more confuse the complexity, and render distinction of species impossible. For, in spite of all Mr. Darwin has to say about the extinction of the weaker varieties, the fact is, they are not at all extinguished, but keep their ground as well as the higher classes, or perhaps better. And if a snail, or a worm, can contrive to live now in an unimproved condition, why should its improving cousin die off? Did its improvement kill it? And so of improving mollusks, and welldoing radiates, and aspiring rabbits, and all the rest. The world ought to be so full of them that no man could sort them off into species, or tell which was fish, which was flesh, and which red herring; and no pork packer could distinguish hog from dog.

But instead of any such horrible confusion of a world full of mongrels, we discover a clear and well defined distinction of species, known even to the poor animals themselves, and by their instincts made known to all mankind. The Creator, who created all creatures after their kind, implanted in them an instinct of breeding only with their own species; and placed a bar in the way of man's vain attempts to work confusion of species, by rendering the hybrid offspring of different species sterile, or only capable of breeding back to the pure blood. Innumerable attempts have been made by fraud and force to procure cross breeds

of different species of plants and animals, but always with the same result-the extinction of the progeny of the hybrid, unless bred back to nature. While a mingling of various breeds of the same species-horses, sheep, or cattle-generally increases fertility, the attempt to mingle different species, as the horse and the ass, though so similar, always produces sterile offspring. It is impossible to conceive any form in which the Creator could more emphatically protest against the attempt to confuse the distinctions of species He established.

God has fixed a barrier against the mixture or confusion of species by cross breeding, by ordaining the sterility of hybrids. Mr. Darwin labors in vain to explain away this great fact. It can not be explained into conformity with the evolution theory; for in that theory all species are only breeds or varieties of one species, and ought to increase their fertility by cross breeding. With all scientific naturalists, as with all people of common sense, this proves that species have a distinct existence in nature, and that the Creator has ordained the continuance of their distinct existence; which is the denial of evolution.

When Mr. Darwin retreats into the geologic ages, and confessing that his principle has ceased to be operative now in our world, and refers us to them for such evolution of one species from another, he abandons the fundamental principle of his school-the uniformity of nature-and falls back on Christian ground the necessity for supernatural origins. He virtually admits the death or superannuation of Natural Selection, since it has retired from the business of species-making.

But when we go back to those old geologic ages, we find that species were then not only as distinct as now, but that the distinctions were even bolder and more visible. Many of them have ceased to exist, but they have left their

asserts.

shells, their petrified casts, and their bones, by which we can see that they stood apart in well-defined groups, without any such blending and confusion as the evolution theory Over three thousand species are already classified. Between every two of them there ought to be, on Mr. Darwin's showing, a hundred intermediate variations at the least; and between some of the more widely separated forms there ought to be thousands of intermediate varieties; as for instance between the bear and the whale; and a still greater number between the mollusk with its external shell, and the vertebrate with its internal skeleton. And we ought to find these intermediate forms closely connected with their parents and their children. For intermediate forms in another continent could not be the connecting links between the mollusks and vertebrates of a distant country, say of England. In the same strata in which we find the two ends of the chain, and lying between the two ends of the chain, we ought to find the connecting links. And we ought to find a hundred connecting links for every specimen of distinct species, since Mr. Darwin alleges that they must have lived and died somewhere; and we have seen they must have lived and died right there where 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 cchinoderms, palms, ferns, firs, and mosses, all sorts of quadrupeds from a mou-e 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 be-' tween 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

pay

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 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 o life, all the four kingdoms-the radiates, the mollusks, the articulates, and the fish! Evidently, then, there was ne 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 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 crusteceans, 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 an