Well, I come back, notwithstanding, to my position,--that your right to _affirm_ this must altogether depend on the exhaustive power of that experience on which you build. And it will be overthrown, if I can show that skeletons have been made in some other way than by the agency of living blood. Can I do this? I think I can. At least I think I can show enough greatly to diminish, if not altogether to destroy, the confidence with which you inferred the existence of vast periods of past time from geological phenomena. I can adduce a principle, having the universality (within its proper sphere) of LAW, hitherto unrecognised, whose tendency is to invalidate the testimony of your witness. V. POSTULATES. "A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no farther; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity."--BACON. "'What was the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl?' 'That the soul of our grand-dam might haply inhabit a bird.' 'What thinkest thou of his opinion?' 'I think nobly of the soul, and in nowise receive his opinion.'" SHAKSPEARE. As without some common ground it is impossible to reason, I shall take for granted the two following principles:-- I. THE CREATION OF MATTER. II. THE PERSISTENCE OF SPECIES. I. If any geologist take the position of the necessary eternity of matter, dispensing with a Creator, on the old ground, _ex nihilo nihil fit_,--I do not argue with him. I assume that at some period or other in past eternity there existed nothing but the Eternal God, and that He called the universe into being out of nothing. II. I demand also, in opposition to the development hypothesis, the perpetuity of specific characters, from the moment when the respective creatures were called into being, till they cease to be. I assume that each organism which the Creator educed was stamped with an indelible specific character, which made it what it was, and distinguished it from everything else, however near or like. I assume that such character has been, and is, indelible and immutable; that the characters which distinguish species from species _now_, were as definite at the first instant of their creation as now, and are as distinct now as they were then. If any choose to maintain, as many do, that species were gradually brought to their present maturity from humbler forms,--whether by the force of appetency in individuals, or by progressive development in generations--he is welcome to his hypothesis, but I have nothing to do with it. These pages will not touch him.