Twilight and Dawn; Or, Simple Talks on the Six Days of CreationPridham, Caroline
Religion
Twilight and Dawn; Or, Simple Talks on the Six Days of Creation
Pridham, Caroline
Creation -- Juvenile literature
It is very beautiful to see that God has formed His creatures on such
different plans, and though we shall be able to say very little about them,
I hope you will by-and-by study Natural History, and learn more and more
of His care in fitting each for the life it has to live. But remember that
all these types of animals, the Radiates, Molluscs, Articulates (as the
members of the "ringed" family are sometimes sailed), existed in the most
ancient times: they lived side by side, as it were, and were not, as some
philosophers would have us believe, derived from each other. Each was
"after its kind," and each species remains; animals may alter from changes
in their way of life, but there is no passing from one _kind_ to another.
Now I think you will be interested to hear that in the Stone Book, some
of the most ancient "letters" are formed from creatures belonging to the
Invertebrate Group. We were speaking just now of the white clay brought up
from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean by the sounding line. The microscope
shows that it consists of the imperishable part of creatures, tinier than
any you can imagine, which had the power when living of extracting from the
sea-water--as I told you is the way of the corals--the lime which formed
their outer coat, or skeleton. These busy workers lived their little day,
and then as they died, the shell-like coverings sank to the bottom of the
sea, forming, as ages passed, thick beds of chalk, such as that of which
the white cliffs of Dover are built up.
Then, as the sounding-line searches still deeper ocean-depths, it brings up
a red clay, and this again is shown by the microscope to be composed partly
of very minute creatures of a reddish colour, which live near the surface
of the ocean, but when they die sink to the bottom.
Sponges, too, which form the home of great numbers of little radiates, grow
upon the ocean floor or near the bottom of the sea; their tiny tenants,
like minute cells, living upon still smaller creatures contained in the
water which is held by the sponge.
And we are told that in some places the bottom of the sea is strewn with
star-fishes and their relations, some of them very beautiful in form and
colour, but all formed on the same plan of a central plate, from which five
arms or fingers radiate.
Do we not better understand that the waters did indeed "swarm with swarms"
when we learn even a little about these living creatures, many of them
so small that we should not be aware of their existence if we had no
microscope to reveal to us their countless myriads?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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