vital supply from without, no elixir of life for organic nature in
general. There is no longer within easy reach a tree of life from which
we may pluck and eat and live forever. And as the individual grows old
and dies, so do species and even whole tribes degenerate and become
extinct.

"From scarpéd cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone.'"

The glorious flood of vitality, so prodigally lavished upon our world in
the beginning, has been ebbing lower and lower; and the theory of
organic nature steadily advancing from the lower to the higher is
manifestly just as puerile as the old hope of creating energy by a
perpetual-motion machine,--and a mistake of precisely the same nature.
Both are contradicted by the magnificent law of the Conservation of
Energy, which, as we have said, is only the scientific expression of the
Scriptural statement that Creation is completed, so far as our world is
concerned; though, as the "wages of sin," death has been decreed upon
the individual, and degeneration more or less marked upon every organic
type. The fossils of the past, as well as our own experience within the
historic period, confirm the view already arrived at on other grounds
that _Creation is a completed work and is not now going on_; and the
universal testimony from organic nature is that degeneration and decay
have marked the history of every living form. Just as the individual
grows old and dies, so do species degenerate and become extinct.



III