i 4 
THE LIVING WORLD. 
the face of the waters;” before the vapors had condensed; before the great 
furnace (the sun) of the sky had been started, to set a myriad of worlds in 
motion, singing measureless praises round the circle of infinite space, and in 
glad hallelujahs of trembling light. With equal wonder we strive to conceive 
our planet as it appeared fresh from the Creator’s hands, with water every¬ 
where abounding and life in its every wave, and try vainly to imagine the 
condition of creation when the waters were gathered together in one place, 
and the dry land appeared carpeted with the Edenic flora, and everywhere, 
in water, land and sky, multiplied species revelled in proud ecstasy of being. 
While it is not given us to know all that our longing minds perpetually 
try to prefigure, with similitudes by which we are surrounded, imagination 
is powerfully reenforced by the glimpses which we take of the inconceivably 
FISHES OF THE SILURIAN AGE. 
remote past through a study of comparative zoology and analogy. And in 
the beginning it may be well to announce, without inviting polemical 
discussion, that the Genetic, or scriptural, account of creation is in complete 
accord with the revelations of geology, a knowledge of which serves to confirm 
the truth of what the inspired writer recorded with an exactness that 
removes every doubt as to the source from whence the information emanated. 
Every evidence uncovered by the pick of the geologist, and every discovery 
made by the search of the palaeonlotogist have conjunctively established the long 
disputed theory of the gradual unfolding and development of creation. As the 
flower bursts from the bud, and as the perfect creature has its growth 
from an egg, so has the world attained its present condition by continuous 
development. With God a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand 
