special and immediate exercise of God's power, it is reasonable to suppose that He created it in the same way at the beginning.

At the foundation of evolution is the postulate that one species is evolved into another. But no process by which one species of animals is transformed into another is now in operation, nor has been in all the known past. I believe, with Agassiz and other Christian scientists, that creation was the immediate act of God, and that from the beginning there has been a series of creations, and no science can assign a better cause for any formation or existence than that God made it; that affords a complete, consistent and reasonable explanation of all the facts of science.

Diversity in nature is God's plan. He has made different species, just as he has made no two persons exactly alike, nor two leaves of trees precisely the same. Varieties are innumerable, and the causes producing them are in constant operation, but they are confined strictly within the limits of species. The bounds of one may touch closely upon another, but they never overlap, nor run into one another. As Agassiz says, they move in regular cycles, but the cycles never run into one another. Domestic animals of the same species are found in great varieties, but no matter how great the differences in varieties, a sheep is always a sheep, and a horse, whether a Shetland pony or Percheron, is always a horse. Pigeons

exist in numerous varieties, but are never transformed into any other kind of bird. No connecting link between different species has ever been discovered. If such "links," or intermediate species, ever existed, they would be found in every stage of development. Between man and the ape (supposing man to be thus developed, for the sake of illustration) there would be innumerable creatures, varying in form and shape as they gradually emerged from the ape to man. For instance, we would find them with tails of every length, from the present long-tailed ape down to a mere stump, which finally disappeared when the human stage was reached. Lord Monboddo's explanation of its disappearance is as satisfactory as any other-" Man rubbed off his tail by sitting on it." But, unfortunately for this theory, the lower extremity of man's spine has none of the functions of a tail, whether in a rudimentary state, or lost by disuse.

""Tisn't easy to settle when man became man,

When the monkey-type stopped and the human began, As some very queer things were involved in the plan." It is a little singular how tails come and go in the story of man's evolution. His remote ancestor, the tadpole, lost his by dragging it on the ground until it disappeared in his progeny, the frog. In the Primary Period, the caudal appendage was, it seems, not needed; but in subsequent developments it again appeared in man's immediate progenitor, the monkey,"

which has a long, strong tail. Having reached its full development in the monkey, it suddenly disappears in his descendant, man, as explained by Lord Monboddo. But it takes a scientist to appreciate such transformation.

The connecting link, or the evidence for the transmutation of species, has been looked for in vain in fossil remains. The fossil proofs, which ought to be most numerous between man and his brutish ancestor, because man is a late, if not the very last, animal creation, are confessedly wanting, and the want of them is fatal to the theory. Many plants and animals sculptured on the ancient monuments of Egypt are the same to-day as they were fifty centuries ago. The same may be said of barley and wheat found in the tombs of the Pharaohs. Bones, or fossils, estimated to be many thousand years old, are the same as those of like species now existing, proving that animals now living in many parts of the earth are of the same type as those which lived thirty thousand years ago, or more. It is estimated that the coral reefs of the ocean must have required at least a hundred thousand years for their formation; but no change in all that period has taken place in the zoophytes by which they were formed. Evolution has left them as they were in the beginning. Even Professor Huxley admits that "there is no instance in which a group of animals having all the characters exhibited by species in nature has ever been orig

inated by selection, whether natural or artificial." Darwin admits that the weight of authority is against the theory of transmutation of species. He says: "The transitional forms joining living and extinct species not being found; the sudden manner in which several groups of species first appear in European formations; the almost entire absence, as at present known, of formations rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian strata, are all undoubtedly difficulties of the most serious nature. We see this in the fact that the most eminent paleontologists, namely, Cuvier, Agassiz, Barranda, Pictel, E. Forbes, Falconer, etc., and all our greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, etc., have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species."

Geology proves that in the ages of living creatures the highest and most complicated organization existed, and as there are no evidences of other creatures at all approaching them from which they could have been evolved, they must have been immediate creations and not the slow product of evolution. The Devonian Age commenced with the highest type of fish. The hugest reptiles, far exceeding in size any at present existing, introduced the Reptilian Age. Mastodons introduced the Age of Mammals. The earliest fossils are of plants and animals that lived in water, or when the earth was almost entirely covered with water. But the shells of the Age of Mollusks show no signs of evolution; for there is just as

much evidence that the largest were created first as that the smallest first appeared. The tiniest shells, invisible to the naked eye, are found with others of enormous size, as much as four feet across: they were apparently created contemporaneously. The general tendency of the facts of paleontology are regarded by some of the most eminent English and American scientists as being dead against evolution. Hugh Miller asserts that the fossil remains furnish evidence of degradation from a higher to a lower order, instead of an upward tendency from the lower. It is sacrificing truth to assert that paleontology affords any support to this arbitrary hypothesis, and it is only from the fossil remains that evidence is possible.

Skeptical scientists attempt to avoid the evidence of permanency of type in a way that seems to be more puerile than philosophical. They are obliged to admit the persistence of types under the same conditions. Change, they tell us, depends on surroundings, or the influence of conditions. Some insects, reptiles and animals are contented with their environment, and remain unchanged in type through long periods of time. Others, not satisfied with their condition, are pushing ahead for some better state, and in the course of some millions of years change their type. And so Prof. Huxley maintains that permanency of type in certain animals and vegetables is consistent with evolution. Some types, it seems, are discontented or ambitious, and constantly