Science has long taught that the _absence_ of necessary physiological conditions results everywhere in the _disappearance_ of vital phenomena; by reversing its logical methods, it will also find that the _presence_ of these necessary conditions results everywhere in the _appearance_ of vital phenomena. Take, for instance, the vegetation of Northern Europe, where it is known that the oak succeeded the pine, and the beech the oak, after each had held possession of the soil for we know not how many thousand years. In bringing about the necessary conditions of soil, the pine paved the way for the oak, and that in turn paved the way for the beech. Neither sprang from the other, nor did the "selection of the fittest" have anything to do with the appearance or disappearance of either. Each yielded fruit "after his kind," whose "seed" (germinal principle of life) was in itself, i.e., after its own kind, upon the earth, and made its appearance spontaneously,--that is, without the presence of natural seed,--whenever the necessary environing conditions favored. And the same law of vegetal propagation is everywhere operative to-day, in the alternations of forest growths, the spontaneous appearance of oak forests where pine have been cleared away, and _vice versa_, in some parts of the country, where heavy forests of oak timber have been felled. So with the new growths of timber springing up in the paths of tornadoes, over large burnt districts, in soils brought up from below the last glacial drift, and in hundreds of other instances which the reader will find conclusively verified in these pages,--all making their appearance without the possible intervention of natural seeds. The great value of the Septuagint, as compared with other versions of the Hebrew Bible, will appear from the fact that it is older by many hundred years than any manuscript copy of the Hebrew text now extant. It was undoubtedly translated at Alexandria, in Egypt, as early as the third century before Christ, while the oldest known Hebrew MS. is a Pentateuch roll dating no further back than A. D. 580. Its translators had before them much older and more perfect MSS. than any that survived to the time of the masoretic recension, when an attempt was made to give uniformity to the readings and renderings of the Hebrew text by means of the vowel points, diacritical signs, terminal letters, etc., all of which are now subject to rejection by the best Oriental scholarship.