Meanwhile, the amplitude of the current epoch, if we may so speak, gives scope and verge enough for all the requirements of the problem to be solved, the conditions of the argument to be established, the process of reasoning to be employed. An experience not merely of six thousand years, but an experience embracing a uniformity of results in all the hundreds of thousands of instances into which animate nature is divided, in all the countless species of plants and animals which have existed successively throughout the whole of that period, furnishes proof of such a cumulative kind as approaches, if not to demonstration, at least to the nearest possible degree of certainty. There is no instance of a single transmutation of a vegetable species into another species, of algæ into fuci or conversely, of grasses into cereals, of endogens into exogens, of the pine into the oak; and the same of animal species, where, through all the living tribes, the fixity of family law has maintained its steady, unchanging course since Adam gave names to them, down to the present hour. What link in the chain is wanting? The course of creation is verified and complete. The exception would be a miracle. And we are not at liberty, upon just principles of ratiocination, to refuse our assent, where all the facts, indefinite as to number, are exclusively on one side, and none upon the other. Our belief in the case is defined and restrained by the absolute uniformity of stubborn, unbending nature; and an appeal from the known to the unknown, from the human to the geological epochs, is just to relinquish reason for the dominion of imagination, the evidences of the senses for the visions of fancy. The shark, rapacious as ever, holds the empire of the seas—the lion, the domain of the forest—the eagle, the region of the air—and man, progressive man, alone looks unto the heavens and blesses his Maker. Hume was so impressed with the force of this argument, as to maintain, upon the ground of it, the absolute impossibility of establishing the truth of a single _miraculous_ event, or of any event that did not harmonize with the existing course of nature. The Laws of Nature have been so uniform, within the entire range of human experience, as that no testimony or reasoning of man, says that subtile dialectitian, can invalidate their authority, or render credible any alleged case of discrepancy or of deviation.—The author of the “Vestiges,” for the first time, has cast the whole weight of this evidence aside, or holds it as even scarcely relevant in a question of proof. And thus outstripping, as he does, both the measure and the requirements of the Christian’s faith, he may be safely left to the logic of its most merciless adversary in dealing with the phenomenal or imaginary transmutations of the geological epochs.