To what we might thus be assured of, even if we had only general principles to guide us, all obtainable evidence unanimously testifies. Geology distinctly proclaims that every portion of our globe's surface has undergone vast changes, and that its organic inhabitants have changed simultaneously and proportionately. The proof absolute, which it furnishes, that at a period when few, if any, existing species had made their appearance, many species now extinct already existed, is proof equally absolute that if all species extinct and extant were created, they cannot, at any rate, have been created at the same time. Of so much at least we must be satisfied, unless we are prepared to accept the ingenious conjecture of an orthodox divine, that, while our earth was being formed out of chaos, Satan, to confound the faith of remote generations, brought over bones of monsters from other worlds and embedded them in the soil of ours, or that, as the same idea has been otherwise expressed, while the earth's crust was a baking the devil had a finger in the pie. Moreover, on the supposition that there was a break of ages between the creations of extinct and of extant species, as geology positively declares there must have been if both were separately created, how passing strange is the 'grand fact that all extinct beings can be classed with all recent beings'! The strangeness disappears, however, when both are regarded as descendants of common progenitors. The wonder would then be if they could not be so classed. Again, how astonishing on the creative, how natural on the evolutionary hypothesis, that the arrangement of bones in the hand of a man, the wing of a bat, the fin of a porpoise, the leg of a horse, should be precisely the same; the number of vertebrae in the neck of a giraffe, and in that of an elephant the same; the primitive germs from which a man, a dog, a frog, and a lobster are gradually evolved, to all appearance the same--the same microscopic atom of homogeneous matter, undistinguishable by any known test from an animalcule almost at the bottom of the organic scale! Above all, that the courses by which animals of all degrees of complexity are gradually developed from apparently equally simple germs should, whenever traceable, be found to consist of progressive ramifications, so that every higher animal, before arriving at maturity, passes through several stages at the end of each of which lower animals have stopped! How impossible, or how easy, to understand, according as the one or the other hypothesis is adopted, is the phenomenon of what in the one case will be treated as rudimentary, in the other as obsolete, organs! No one need scruple to regard these as apparatus which the creature has outgrown and allowed to fall into decay through neglect; but whatever there is in us of real nobleness of feeling revolts against the notion of their being apparatus which a divine Creator began to build but was not able to finish.