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still sport themselves among the meadow-like verdure of the 
vast Sargasso seas ? — the Atlantic, one little less in area than 
the surface of Europe, teeming with vegetable life, being, for 
the most part, green as any meadow, and covering the ocean 
as with an emerald mantle, where sea-weeds float with stems 
800 feet long. The progress of geological discovery is break- 
ing down, and rendering the successive creation theory no 
longer tenable. Yet with all this progress we find no traces 
of successive development. Mr. Darwin can find no proof of 
his favourite theory in any known geological records of the 
earth's history. He confesses that he can only expect to find 
his negative evidence in strata hereafter to be explored far 
beneath any strata yet investigated. Sir Charles Lyell would 
seek for the same negative evidence of the ape's transforma- 
tion into man in unknown geological strata ! 
But what can be more unphilosophical than theories which 
depend, not on facts, but on negative evidence — that is, 
simply on the dreams of man's imaginative faculty ? The actual 
progress of geology leads us only to the unity of the creation. It 
gives no countenance to any progressive development. The 
lowest forms of the supposed most ancient strata have not 
made the slightest progress. Their congeners — nay, in many 
instances the same identical species — swarm in our existing 
seas without showing the slightest trace of modification or 
progress. The foraminifera, dredged from the bottom of the 
Atlantic, and now flourishing abundantly on the surface of the 
Atlantic, are specifically identical with those whose fossils are 
so abundant in the cretaceous formation of Europe. Sir 
Charles Lyell says, in his Elements , p. 318 : — 
“ That white chalk is now forming in the depths of the ocean may now be 
regarded as an ascertained fact, because the Globigerina bulloides is specifi- 
cally undistinguishable from a fossil which constitutes a large portion of the 
chalk of Europe.” 
But what, I would ask, must fall with the successive crea- 
tion theory ? If all geological strata contain only the records 
of one creation — if there be no proof, but rather the contrary, 
of any new creation, of the successive appearance of any new 
species, the originals of the present earth's fauna must be 
as old as any creatures whose remains can be found in the 
marine-formed strata of the earth. The fossil medals of crea- 
tion must, with the fall of the successive creation theory, fail 
to give any record of the time when they were stamped in 
Nature's mint — at any rate, till some sure evidence be found 
on which the development theory can rest. 
vol. hi. g 
