Hesiod, who suffered no important fact of the _Cosmos_ to escape him,
would have given us some hint of it in his "Works and Days;" for Greece
was, even in his early day, largely the recipient of Phoenician learning
and literature, as she was certainly Phoenicia's foster-child in letters.

But the more conclusive proofs of the correctness of the order of
creation, as given in the Bible Genesis, are to be found in the accurate
observations of modern geological science. Before there could have
appeared in the primeval oceans any living organism, even the lowest
primordial forms of crustacea, there must have been marine
vegetation--that springing from inorganic matter and laying the foundation
of organic life. Plants originate in, and are solely nourished by,
inorganic substances; or, to speak more definitely, they originate from
primordial germs--the first elementary principles of life--whenever
inorganic conditions favor, and, assimilating air, water, and other
inorganic materials, convert them into organic substances, or such as
answer to the conditions of organic life. In doing this, they take up and
decompose carbonic acid, retain the carbon, and give off oxygen--a vital
process not known to occur in the case of animal life. That their
primordial germs, or vital units, are in the earth, as the Bible Genesis
declares, is conclusively shown by the experimental processes first
successfully entered upon by the AbbA(C) Spallanzani, Charles Bonnet, and
others, and more recently renewed and advocated by M. Pasteur, and his
co-laborers in super-heated flask experimentation, as well as logically
established by inductive methods.

_Nihil ex nihilo_ is conceded to be as conclusive an induction as _omne
vivum ex vivo._ That is, as without some chemical unit--some primary least
considered as a whole--there can be no chemical action, so without some
vital unit, in the same primary sense, there can be no vital