lower. Davis "Physical Geograhy" [tr. note: sic] says (page 17):

"Age of the Earth.—It is impossible to say what the age of the earth and the solar system is, but it certainly should be reckoned in millions and millions of years. There is every reason to believe that the sun and the planets existed for an indefinitely long period before the condition of the earth's surface was such as to allow the habitation of the planet by plants and animals. It is well proved by the prints or fossils of various plants and animals in ancient rock layers that these lower forms of life existed upon the earth for a vast length of time, millions and millions of years before man appeared."

Here, then, we are squarely confronted by the issue. Either the rocks testify to a slow evolution of plant and animal life, or they supply no such testimony. Professor Downing of Chicago University, says that this is indeed, the one primary argument for evolution, the rest being simply corroborative. On this rock evolutionists build their scientific Faith. Let us investigate.

We shall note, to begin with, that there are, indeed, a larger number of species, both of animals and plants, preserved in the rocks,—thousands, in fact. There are lowly organisms, of the crab and cuttle fish variety, and more highly organized forms, fishes and birds, and there are the prints and fossilized bones of great monsters, huge lizards and sloths and other mammalia. It is possible to establish a gradation in this great catalog of fossils, beginning with the largest or most perfectly developed, and ending with the animals lower in the scale of life; or vice versa. The evolutionists say, vice versa, the simplest first, the most complex last, and then they add: So they have developed.

At this point we shall first quote one of the earliest palaeontologists, and one of the most famous, Hugh Miller, whose "Old Red Sandstone," first published in 1841, has now been republished in the "Everyman Library." In this brilliant work, Miller pays his respects to the evolutionists of his age. He refers to Lamarck and says: "The ingenious foreigner, on the strength of a few striking facts which prove that to a certain extent the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, and their forms changed from a lower to a higher degree of adaptation to their circumstances, has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior order of being towards the superior, and that the off-spring of creatures low in the scale in the present time may hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and nobler species, a few thousand years hence. . . . He has argued on this principle of improvement and adaptation,—which, carry it as far as we rationally may, still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and the dog a dog,—that in the vast course of ages, inferior have risen into superior natures, and lower into higher races; that molluscs and zoophytes have passed into fish and reptiles, and fish and reptiles into birds and quadrupeds; that unformed gelatinous bodies, with an organisation scarcely traceable, have been metamorphosed into oaks and cedars; and that monkeys and apes have been transformed into human creatures, capable of understanding and admiring the theories of Lamarck.