a believer on God’s terms at a much less expense of credulity than an infidel on yours.” But in this form at least it can be scarce necessary that the argument should be prolonged. The geological phenomena, I repeat, even had the author of the “Vestiges” been consulted in their arrangement, and permitted to determine their sequence, would fail to furnish a single presumption in favor of the development hypothesis. Does the ditch-side of my illustration furnish it with a single favoring presumption? The arrangement and sequence of the various organisms are complete in both the zoological and phytological branch. The flag and reed succeed the fucoid; the fir and juniper succeed the flag and reed; and the hazel, birch, and oak succeed the fir and juniper. In like manner, and with equal regularity, zoophytes, the radiata, the articulata, mollusca, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, are ranged, the superior in succession over the inferior classes, in the true ascending order; and yet we at once see that the evidence of the ditch-side, amounting in the aggregate to no more than this, that the remains of the higher lie over those of the lower organisms, gives not a shadow of support to the hypothesis that the lower produced the higher. For, according to the honest farmer, the fact that any one thing is found lying on the top of any other thing, furnishes no presumption whatever that the thing below stands in the relation of parent to the thing above. And the evidence which the well-ranged organisms of the ditch-side do not furnish, the organisms of the entire geologic scale, even were they equally well ranged, would fail to supply. The fossiliferous portion of the ditch-side of my illustration may be, let us suppose, some five or six _feet_ in thickness; the fossiliferous portion of the earth’s crust must be some five or six _miles_ in thickness. But the mere circumstance of space introduces no new element into the question. Equally in both cases the fact of superposition is not _identical_ with the fact of parental relation, nor even in any degree an _analogous_ fact.