CHAPTER X 
ON THE UNITY OF THE SYSTEM OF NATURE. 
The modern naturalist, eschewing the atheistical doc¬ 
trine of spontaneous generation, assigns to every organized 
being a parentage or a Creator. Parentage is regarded as 
the immediate source of organic existence, and may often 
be traced for several successive generations: even when 
lost to our means of enquiry, it needs no stretch of the 
imagination to suppose parentage extending backwards 
into the past for an indefinite number of years. We thus 
postpone but cannot dissipate the necessity for a Creator. 
Hie first parent or parents must have received existence 
at the hands of God. A question therefore arises—a ques¬ 
tion to which the reply must be in the negative — was the 
animal kingdom the instantaneous result of a single man¬ 
date of the Almighty ? 
Until lately, the zoologist dealt only with forms that 
were moving and breathing around him; but now the sis¬ 
ter science of Geology has opened another avenue to know¬ 
ledge, an avenue that conducts him through countless ages 
of the past. This wonderful science has unsealed a book 
of facts far more extraordinary than the fictions of the 
most brilliant imagination. From Geology we learn that 
