they have apparently lain for the period named by our scientific friends
referred to. The fault is not ours, but theirs, that they are in error.
Had they determined to study the subject of life, as we have done, from
the Bible as well as from nature, they would have commenced at these
toad-producing rocks, and worked their way upward to the source of all
life, and not downward to the vanishing point--that where animal life
ceases in the azoic rocks. The batrachians are low down in the scale of
nature, but they have a determinate period of existence, as do all other
forms of life. Try your experiments with them; see how long they will live
without light, air, and food. This you can do as well as ourself. Conform
to all the conditions required--the absolute exclusion of light, air, and
food--and you will find that the toughest specimen experimented with is a
dead batrachian inside of one year.

This experimental test should settle the question of lengthened vitality
between us. There is no miracle about this matter at all, and science
finds no stumbling-block in the way of a complete explication of this
riddle, if, in the light of nature, there be any such riddle. We claim
there is not, when we interpret nature in the light of nature's God. Let
the earth, or rather its silicious and other decaying rocks, bring forth
these batrachian forms. The command is imperative and not dependent upon
any "seed" previously scattered or sown in the earth itself.

The father of the writer was Superintendent of the Green Mountain Turnpike
Company, extending from Bellows Falls to Rutland, Vt., from 1812 to 1832,
and worked every rod of that road many times over. From our earliest
boyhood we accompanied him on these working trips, attended by a large
force of laboring men, and our attention was early called to the
characteristics of these toad-producing rocks. The rotting slates, shales,
sandstones, shists, and rocks of various kinds, were often ploughed up by