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Creator (by one who is Himself perfect), could have no fault, 
or disjointed appearance, palpable to fallen man. But it is 
not therefore a consequence that God might not have created 
animals at a subsequent period, such, e. g., as after the Deluge, 
which then would form a better and closer relationship to the 
changed circumstances that had just taken place. The point 
here most to be attended to is, that no living creation preceded 
the one in question. The error of geologists has been the 
mixing up of the cause of the destruction of the present 
creation, mentioned in Revelation, with other causes which 
they suppose preceded it. They erroneously assume that 
death preceded the creation in Genesis ; and therefore they 
deny that all the ravages caused by death could have pro- 
ceeded from the one deluge mentioned in Genesis. But 
there is more difficulty here in believing that all the evidences 
of destruction of life which we discover buried in the earth 
proceeded from different and successive causes, than there is 
in believing and proving that death proceeded from one cause, 
as stated in Genesis. 
If we proceed to investigate and to compare the remains of 
fossil animals of all kinds that have ever been exhumed from 
the earth, we shall find that there is no exception to this rule : 
that independently of the marks of design which identify 
them as the work of the same God, there are other marks 
upon them which show that they filled up places that must 
otherwise have been vacant in that creation which was pro- 
nounced by God to be “ very good.” 
And as we know that many parts of that creation have 
become extinct, that some hundreds of its higher species, 
and four-fifths of its lower species have disappeared (for 
though these may not be all extinct, yet we have never 
seen them alive, and only some of them in a fossil state), we 
are sure there must be found in the earth many animals, the 
representatives of which are not now seen amongst the living 
parts ; yet amongst none of them could it be said from their 
appearance that they had no connection, and were totally 
isolated from the living creations supposed to precede the one 
mentioned in Genesis. Everything that has been discovered 
in the earth, only serves to make more perfect that living 
creation which, as far as we know of its disjointed character, 
occupies the earth at the present time. 
It is in this way that we are indebted to geology for in- 
structing us more minutely as to what the creation must have 
been at the time when it received the title of “very good, 
when it came forth from the hands of the Creator. And but 
for the discoveries of geology, we should have had a less 
