thout human
control, would be merged each class into one, with only the slight
differences occasioned by diversities of climate and other external
conditions. If in the sight of man it is important that the words of a
book should be kept distinct, it is equally evident that in the sight of
God it is no less important that the "units of nature" should not be
mixed in inextricable and indistinguishable confusion.

Fifthly. The sudden appearance of new kinds of animals is another fact
which Palaeontologists urge against the doctrine of evolution. According
to the view of geologists great changes have, at remote periods,
occurred in the state of the earth. Continents have been submerged and
the bottom of the sea raised above the surface of the waters.
Corresponding changes have occurred in the state of the atmosphere
surrounding the globe, and in the temperature of the earth. Accompanying
or following these revolutions new classes of plants and animals appear,
adapted to the new condition of the earth's surface. Whence do they
come? They have, as Dawson expresses it, neither fathers nor mothers.
Nothing precedes them from which they could be derived; and nothing of
the same kind follows them. They live through their appointed period;
and then, in a multitude of cases, finally disappear, and are in their
turn followed by new orders or kinds. In other words, the links or
connecting forms of this assumed regular succession or derivation are
not to be found. This fact is so patent, that Hugh Miller, when arguing
against the doctrine of evolution as proposed in the "Vestiges of
Creation," says, that the record in the rocks seems to have been written
for the very purpose of proving that such evolution is impossible.

We have the explicit testimony of Agassiz, as a Palaeontologist, that the
facts of geology contradict the theory of the transmutation of species.
This testimony has been repeatedly given and in various forms. In the
last production of his pen, he says: "As a Palaeontologist I have from
the beginning stood aloof from this new theory of transmutation, now so
widely admitted by the scientific world. Its doctrines, in fact,
contradict what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth
tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface of the
globe." "Let us look now at the earliest vertebrates, as known and
recorded in geological surveys. They should, of course, if there is any
truth in the tra