At any rate, if any particular example be disallowed, the general objection must be admitted to be weighty. Now the intervention of any system of created designs of animal form--however little its details be understood--and the production of variations under _divine guidance_ which would lead more directly to the accomplishment of such forms as the complicated flowers of orchids above described, would unquestionably tend to shorten the requisite time. There would, by a process of reasoning easily followed, be an immediate reduction of the ages required, within practicable limits, though the time must still remain long. More than that is not necessary. The Ussherian chronology is not of Divine revelation, though some persons speak of it as if it was. There is not the shadow of a reason to be gleaned from the Bible, nor from any other source, that the commencement of orderly development, the separation of land and water, earth and sky, and the subsequent provision of designs for organic forms of life and the first steps that followed the issue of the design, began six thousand years ago, or anything like it. It can be shown, indeed, that _historical_ man, or the specific origin of the man spoken of as Adam, dates back but a limited time; and it is calculable with some degree of probability how far; but that is all. We are therefore in no difficulty when ample time is demanded; but we are in the greatest straits when the illimitable demands of a slowly and minutely stepping development, perpetually liable to be checked, turned back, and even obliterated, have to be confronted with other weighty probabilities and calculations regarding the sun's light and heat, and the duration of particular geologic eras. CHAPTER VII. _THE DESCENT OF MAN_. We now approach a special objection which always, has been (and I shall be pardoned, perhaps, for saying _always will be_) the _crux_ of the theory of unaided, uncreated evolution--the advent of reasoning, and not only reasoning, but self-conscious and God-conscious MAN. Here again the lines of argument are so numerous, and the details into which we might go so varied, that a rigid and perhaps bald selection of a few topics is all that can be attempted.