a, (See fig. 5, page 48.) Each of the extinct groups
had, we find, a beginning and an end;--there is not in the wide domain
of physical science a more certain fact; and every species of the group
which now exists had, like all their predecessors on the scene, their
beginning also. The "infinite series" of the atheists of former times
can have no place in modern science: all organic existences, recent or
extinct, vegetable or animal, have had their beginning;--there was a
time when they were not. The geologist can indicate that time, if not by
years, at least by periods, and show what its relations were to the
periods that went before and that came after; and as it is equally a
recognized truth on both sides of the controversy, that as something now
exists, something must have existed forever, and as it must now be not
less surely recognized, that that something was not the race of man, nor
yet any other of the many races of man's predecessors or contemporaries,
the question, What then was that something? comes with a point and
directness which it did not possess at any former time. By what, or
through whom, did these races of nicely organized plants and animals
begin to be? Hitherto at least there has been but one reply to the
question originated on the skeptical side. All these races, it is said,
have been _developed_, in the long course of ages, into what they now
are, as the young animal is developed in the womb, or the young plant is
developed from the seed. Topsy, in the novel, "'spected that she was not
made, but growed;" and the only class of opponents which the geological
theist finds in the field which his science has laid open to the world
is a class that hold by the philosophy of Topsy.

Let me briefly remark regarding this development hypothesis, with which
I have elsewhere dealt at considerable length, that while the facts of
the geologist are demonstrably such, that is, truths capable of proof,
the hypothesis is a mere dream, unsupported by a shadow of evidence. A
man of a lively imagination could no doubt originate many such dreams;
nay, we know that in the dark ages dreams of the kind were actually
originated. The _Anser Bernicla_, or barnacle goose, a common winter
visitant of our coasts, was once believed to be developed out of
decaying wood long submerged in sea water: and one of our commonest
cirripedes or barnacles, _Lepas anatifera_, still bears, in its specific
name of the goose-producing _lepas_,