a modification of inorganic matter, by natural causes.

The doctrine of special creation owes its existence very largely to the
supposed necessity of making science accord with the Hebrew cosmogony;
but it is curious to observe that, as the doctrine is at present
maintained by men of science, it is as hopelessly inconsistent with the
Hebrew view as any other hypothesis.

If there be any result which has come more clearly out of geological
investigation than another, it is, that the vast series of extinct
animals and plants is not divisible, as it was once supposed to be,
into distinct groups, separated by sharply-marked boundaries. There are
no great gulfs between epochs and formations--no successive periods
marked by the appearance of plants, of water animals, and of land
animals, 'en masse'. Every year adds to the list of links between what
the older geologists supposed to be widely separated epochs: witness the
crags linking the drift with older tertiaries; the Maestricht beds
linking the tertiaries with the chalk; the St. Cassian beds exhibiting
an abundant fauna of mixed mesozoic and palaeozoic types, in rocks of
an epoch once supposed to be eminently poor in life; witness, lastly,
the incessant disputes as to whether a given stratum shall be reckoned
devonian or carboniferous, silurian or devonian, cambrian or silurian.

This truth is further illustrated in a most interesting manner by the
impartial and highly competent testimony of M. Pictet, from whose
calculations of what percentage of the genera of animals, existing in
any formation, lived during the preceding formation, it results that in
no case is the proportion less than 'one-third', or 33 per cent. It is
the triassic formation, or the commencement of the mesozoic epoch,
which has received the smallest inheritance from preceding ages. The