It is not necessary,--at least it does not seem so to me,--that all the members of this mighty commonwealth should have an actual, a diachronic existence; anymore than that, in the creation of a man, his foetal, infantile, and adolescent stages should have an actual, diachronic existence, though these are essential to his normal life-history. Nor would their diachronism be more certainly inferrible from the physical traces of them, in the one case than in the other. In the newly-created Man, the proofs of successive processes requiring time, in the skin, hairs, nails, bones, &c. could in no respect be distinguished from the like proofs in a Man of to-day; yet the developments to which they respectively testify are widely different from each other, so far as regards the element of time. Who will say that the suggestion, _that the strata of the surface of the earth, with their fossil floras and faunas, may possibly belong to a prochronic development of the mighty plan of the life-history of this world_,--who will dare to say that such a suggestion is a self-evident absurdity? If we had no example of such a procedure, we might be justified in dealing cavalierly with the hypothesis; but it has been shown that, without a solitary exception, the whole of the vast vegetable and animal kingdoms were created,--mark! I do not say _may_ have been, but MUST have been created--on this principle of a prochronic development, with distinctly traceable records. It was _the law of organic creation_. It may be objected, that, to assume the world to have been created with fossil skeletons in its crust,--skeletons of animals that never really existed,--is to charge the Creator with forming objects whose sole purpose was to deceive us. The reply is obvious. Were the concentric timber-rings of a created tree formed merely to deceive? Were the growth lines of a created shell intended to deceive? Was the navel of the created Man intended to deceive him into the persuasion that he had had a parent?[102] These peculiarities of structure were inseparable from the adult stage of these creatures respectively, without which they would not have been what they were. The Locust-tree could not have been an adult _Hymenaea_, without concentric rings;--nay, it could not have been an exogenous tree at all. The _Dione_ could not have been a _Dione_ without those foliations and spines that form its generic character. The Man would not have been a Man without a navel.