I am well aware that, to abate if not nullify the force of this apparent absurdity, it will be said that along the actual line between plant life and animal life, the vegetable and animal kingdoms are actually brought closely side by side; that plant life shades off by almost imperceptible stages till it comes so near to the lowest forms of animal life that the dividing line is scarcely if at all perceptible. This fact no scientist disputes. The real question turns upon its purposed object or ultimate reason. Is it, as Mr. Darwin’s theory assumes, to bridge over this dividing line and facilitate the march of “genealogical descent with variations” across what else would be a bad if not an impassable gulf? This being the claim set up by Mr. Darwin, I answer―― (a.) The proper test of this theory is simple: Is there any “_march_” here at all――_i. e._ any _progressive movement_ from one form of vegetable life to another, from lower forms to higher, or as this case seems to demand, from higher forms to lower, for along this dividing line we have the lowest known forms of both vegetable life and animal? Is this army of the lowest vegetable species and of animal life-forms, down in this dark microscopic valley, really _on the march_, or is it absolutely moveless and fixed? Are the flora on the vegetable side of the line really, doffing their plant-life uniform and regalia, and emerging on the other side of the line into fauna to swell the hosts of animal-life forms? This it would seem must be the test for the proof or disproof of Darwin’s theory. (b.) But again, I would reply in this as in other points; Mr. Darwin misses not so much the facts of nature as the ultimate reason of those facts. What is the ultimate reason for the remarkable fact that the plant kingdom crowds itself so closely upon the confines of the animal? Not, I answer, to facilitate the transit of generations from the one province to the other. Of such transit there is not the first shade of evidence. But the reason is that the Great Author of nature out of his infinite resources has _filled both kingdoms perfectly full of life-forms_ so that no territory between their respective domains lies unoccupied. It is simply a fecundity of life-forms or species, analogous to the fecundity of living representatives under most of these species――all alike traceable to the infinite resources of the Creator’s wisdom and power.