312 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES 
rience of but one effect, we could not rationally hold, it has 
been argued, that that producing Cause could have originated 
effects of a higher or more perfect kind. The creation which 
it had produced we knew; but, having no other measure of its 
power, we could not, it was contended, regard it as competent 
to the production of a better or nobler creation, or, of course, 
hold that it could originate such a state of things as that perfect 
future state which Faith delights to contemplate. Now, it has 
been well said of the author of this ingenious sophism, — by 
far the most sagacious of the skeptics, — that if we admit his 
premises, we will find it difficult indeed to set aside his con- 
clusions. And how, in this case, does geology deal with his 
premises? By opening to us the history of the remote past of 
our planet, and introducing us, through the present, to former 
creations, it breaks down that s¢ngularity of effect on which he 
built, and for one creation gives us many. It gives us exactly 
that which, as he truly argued, his contemporaries had not, — 
an experience in creations. And let us mark how, applied to 
each of these in succession, his argument would tell. ‘There 
was a time when life, animal or vegetable, did not exist on our 
planet, and when all creation, from its centre to its cireumfer- 
ence, was but a creation of dead matter. To what effect in 
that early age would have been the argument of Hume? Sim- 
ply to this effect would it have borne, — that, though the pro- 
ducing Cause of what appeared was competent to the formation 
of earths, metals, and minerals, it would be unphilosophic to 
deem it adequate to the origination of a single plant or animal, 
—even to that of a spore or of a monad. Ages pass by, and 
the Paleozoic creation is ushered in, with its tall araucarians 
and pines, its highly organized fishes, and its reptiles of a com- 
paratively low standing. And how now, and with what effect, 
does the argument apply? It is now found that in the earlier 
creation the producing Cause had exerted but a portion of its 
