But though no man lives throughout five hundred years of time, he can trace, by passing in some of the English forests through five hundred yards of space, the history of the oak in all its stages of growth, as correctly as if he _did_ live throughout the five hundred years. Oaks, in the space of a few hundred yards, may be seen in every stage of growth, from the newly burst acorn, that presents to the light its two fleshy lobes, with the first tender rudiments of a leaflet between, up to the giant of the forest, in the hollow of whose trunk the red deer may shelter, and find ample room for the broad spread of his antlers. The fact of the development of the oak, from the minute two-lobed seedling of a week’s growth up to the gigantic tree of five centuries, is as capable of being demonstrated by observation spread over five hundred yards of space, as by observation spread over five hundred years of time. And be it remembered, that the sea-coasts of the world are several hundred thousand miles in extent. Europe is by far the smallest of the earth’s four large divisions, and it is bounded, in proportion to its size, by a greater extent of land than any of the others. And yet the sea-coasts of Europe alone, including those of its islands, exceed twenty-five thousand miles. We have results before us, in this extent of space, identical with those of many hundred thousand years of time; and if terrestrial plants were as certainly developments of the low plants of the sea as the huge oak is a development of the immature seedling, just sprung from the acorn, so vast a stretch of sea-coast could not fail to present us with the intermediate vegetation in all its stages. But the sea-coasts fail to exhibit even a vestige of the intermediate vegetation. Experience spread over an extent of space analogous to millions of years of time, does not furnish, in this department, a single fact corroborative of the development theory, but, on the contrary, many hundreds of facts that bear directly against it.