ical 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
Zoology, 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 rule, by which the
relative age of mountains may be estimated. The oldest mountains are the
lowest, while the younger and more recent ones tower above their
elders, and are usually more torn and dislocated also. This is easily
understood, when we remember that all mountains and mountain-chains are
the result of upheavals, and that the violence of the outbreak must have
been in proportion to the strength of the resista