PROEM TO GENESIS. 625 



gin of the first plant-life, and to the colossal operations by which the 

 earth was fitted for them all ? Mr. Huxley knows very well that it 

 would be in the highest degree irrational to ascribe this correct distri- 

 bution to the doctrine of chances ; nor will the stone of Sisyphus of 

 itself constitute a sufficient answer to inquiries which are founded, not 

 upon a fanciful attempt to equate every word of the Proem with every 

 dictum of science, but upon those principles of probable reasoning by 

 which all rational lives are and must be guided. 



I find the latest published authority on geology in the Second or 

 Mr. Etheridge's volume of the Manual * of Professor Phillips, and by 

 this I will now proceed to test the sixfold series which I have ventured 

 upon presenting. 



First, however, looking back for a moment to a work, obviously of 

 the highest authority,! on the geology of its day, I find in it a table 

 of the order of appearance of animal life upon the earth, which, be- 

 gining with the oldest, gives us — 



1. Invertebrates 4. Birds 



2. Fishes 5. Mammals 



3. Reptiles 6. Man. 



I omit all reference to specifications, and speak only of the princi- 

 pal lines of division. 



In the Phillips-Etheridge Manual, beginning as before with the old- 

 est, I find the following arrangement, given partly by statement and 

 partly by diagram : 



1. " The Azoic or Archsean time of Dana ; " called pre-Cambrian 

 by other physicists (pp. 3, 5). 



2. A commencement of plant-life indicated by Dana as anterior to 

 invertebrate animal life ; long anterior to the vertebrate forms, which 

 alone are mentioned in Genesis (pp. 4, 5). 



3. Three periods of invertebrate life. 



4. Age of fishes. 



5. Age of reptiles. 



6. Age of mammals, much less remote. 



7. Age of man, much less remote than mammals. 



As to birds, though they have not a distinct and separate age 

 assigned them, the Manual (vol. i. ch. xxv. pp. 511-20) supplies us 

 very clearly with their place in " the succession of animal life." We 

 are here furnished with the following series, after the fishes : 1. Fossil 

 reptiles (p. 512) ; 2. Ornithosauria (p. 517) ; they were "flying ani- 

 mals, which combined the characters of reptiles with those of birds ; " 

 3. The first birds of the secondary rocks with " feathers in all respects 

 similar to those of existing birds" (p. 518) ; 4. Mammals (p. 520). 



* Phillips's "Manual of Geology" (vol. ii.) part ii., by R. Etheridge, F. R. S. New 

 edition, 1885. 



f " Palaeontology," by Richard Owen (now Sir Richard Owen, K. C. B.). Second edi- 

 tion, p. 5, 1861. 



VOL. xxviii. — 40 



