had been originally enunciated by Aristotle or Plato? Or--to make the
inquiry still sharper and more emphatic--of what less value is it to
science than if it had originally come from Professor Tyndall or Mr.
Herbert Spencer?

Take the "biblical genesis" as we have enunciated and explained it--with
all the facts crowded into these explanatory pages--and science has no
longer any genetic mystery to brood over, further than that every
operation of nature is a mystery into which it is useless for scientific
speculation to pry. We know what nature _does_, or may know it by the
proper scrutiny, but we shall never know the causes of things, any more
than we shall find God at the bottom of Herbert Spencer's crucible, or at
the top of his ladder of synthesis. In the light of the Bible genesis,
science can account for the origin of the stalwart oak or the lordly pine,
without going back to any mycological or cryptogamic forms, to follow down
an ever-changing vital plexus that is as likely to land in a buttonwood
tree as an oak, or in a hemlock as a pine,--in fact, quite as likely to
land in a carnivorous animal as in an insectivorous plant. "Let the earth
bring forth," is still the eternal fiat,--just as implicitly obeyed to-day
as it was in the world's primeval history, when an exuberance of
endogenous vegetation laid the foundation of the coal measures. It
requires no greater effort on the part of nature to produce the pine, the
oak, the beech, the hickory--all of which we see springing directly from
primordial germs to-day--than it did to produce the lowest vegetal
organism, from an invisible, indestructible "vital unit," or Darwinian
gemmule, thousands of years ago.

He who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and in whose sight a
thousand years are but as yesterday, knows no such "law of variability" as
our materialistic friends have been spinning for us in their unverified