"Age of the Earth.--It is impossible to say what the age of the earth and the solar system is, but it certainly should be reckoned in millions and millions of years. There is every reason to believe that the sun and the planets existed for an indefinitely long period before the condition of the earth's surface was such as to allow the habitation of the planet by plants and animals. It is well proved by the prints or fossils of various plants and animals in ancient rock layers that these lower forms of life existed upon the earth for a vast length of time, millions and millions of years before man appeared." Here, then, we are squarely confronted by the issue. Either the rocks testify to a slow evolution of plant and animal life, or they supply no such testimony. Professor Downing of Chicago University, says that this is indeed, the one primary argument for evolution, the rest being simply corroborative. On this _rock_ evolutionists build their scientific Faith. Let us investigate. We shall note, to begin with, that there are, indeed, a larger number of species, both of animals and plants, preserved in the rocks,--thousands, in fact. There are lowly organisms, of the crab and cuttle fish variety, and more highly organized forms, fishes and birds, and there are the prints and fossilized bones of great monsters, huge lizards and sloths and other mammalia. It is possible to establish a gradation in this great catalog of fossils, beginning with the largest or most perfectly developed, and ending with the animals lower in the scale of life; or vice versa. The evolutionists say, _vice versa,_ the simplest first, the most complex last, and then they add: _So_ they have developed.