It happens that we are not obliged to grant to our author an indefinite lapse of ages for the sake of bringing all his higher principles into action. One of the latest events in the geological history of the earth was a great submersion of the land, by which "terrestrial animal life was extensively, if not universally, destroyed"; so that the creation of the species now in being--at least, all the higher species--was "a comparatively recent event, and one posterior, generally speaking, to all the great natural transactions chronicled by geology." Science does not contradict, it rather confirms, that voice of revelation or tradition, which assigns about six thousand years as the period of man's residence upon the earth. The action of the drama, then, is restricted within moderate limits as to time, and the "natural agencies" and "higher principles" must work fast in order to accomplish their task within the prescribed period. One condition for the creation of a new and permanent species, belonging to any of the higher orders, seems to have escaped our author's notice; at least two individuals, a male and a female, must have been evolved out of the next lower race, before the new species could continue its kind. Apply these considerations to the creation of man, who, according to our author's Scripture, was born of a monkey. To suppose, that, at the first trial, an Adam and an Eve were born near each other, so that they might have a chance of meeting in the course of their lives, would look too much like the operation of intelligence and design. On the theory of an organic creation by law, as the monkey race is spread over large regions of the globe, we must suppose that many of each sex were produced, and died childless, before any Adam was happy enough to find an Eve. Then, at no very distant period, within a few thousand years, the birth of a man from an animal of a lower type was no very strange event. Probably it occurred so often, that the monkeys themselves ceased to be astonished at it. And yet, this tribe of animals, with all the benefit of large experience, with increased numbers, and with all the requisite conditions fulfilled at least as perfectly as they were at the earlier period of their history, have not succeeded, in the three or four thousand years during which they have been subject to the observation of intelligent beings, in producing even a decent semblance of a man.