Genesis, and the writer confidently believes that they contain the true
Genesis of Life, although entirely overlooked, heretofore, by both the
biblical and scientific scholar.

In the work which he here gives to the public, he will endeavor to show
that all the vital phenomena of our globe, with the single exception
named, find their complete explication in this Genesis of Life; and that
we have only to take the scientific Genesis out of some of its more
imposing categories, to make the two either entirely harmonize, or fall
into the same lines of incidence in human thought.

Science has long taught that the _absence_ of necessary physiological
conditions results everywhere in the _disappearance_ of vital phenomena;
by reversing its logical methods, it will also find that the _presence_ of
these necessary conditions results everywhere in the _appearance_ of vital
phenomena. Take, for instance, the vegetation of Northern Europe, where it
is known that the oak succeeded the pine, and the beech the oak, after
each had held possession of the soil for we know not how many thousand
years. In bringing about the necessary conditions of soil, the pine paved
the way for the oak, and that in turn paved the way for the beech. Neither
sprang from the other, nor did the "selection of the fittest" have
anything to do with the appearance or disappearance of either. Each
yielded fruit "after his kind," whose "seed" (germinal principle of life)
was in itself, i.e., after its own kind, upon the earth, and made its
appearance spontaneously,--that is, without the presence of natural
seed,--whenever the necessary environing conditions favored.

And the same law of vegetal propagation is everywhere operative to-day, in
the alternations of forest growths, the spontaneous appearance of oak
forests where pine have been cleared away, and _vice versa_, in some parts