of statement, all according with the exact observations of geologic
science, and supported by paleontologic records,--requires quite as much
credulity of judgment as to accept it for divinely inspired truth. A
disciple of M. Comte might object to this conclusion as susceptible of two
interpretations, the one a legitimate induction, and the other not. But
the mind of the profounder reasoner would accept the interpretation which
is supported by the higher reason, and validated by the greater number of
conclusively-established facts. In the case of a strongly intuitive mind,
it might be possible to guess the exact order of three or four apparently
disconnected events, but to arbitrarily associate with them other and more
distinctively subordinate occurrences, like the appearance or
disappearance of whole groups and classes of plants and animals, the
supposition that guess-work, and not positive information, governed in the
formation of a judgment, is at once rejected because of its utter
incredibility.

It is not our purpose, however, either to affirm or dis-affirm the
inspirational claims of the Bible Genesis. We simply take its language as
we find it, stript of its Masoretic renderings and irrational
interpretations, and unhesitatingly aver that the three Hebrew words,
translated in our common version--"whose seed is in itself upon the earth"
--contains, when properly rendered, the key that unlocks the whole
"mystery of life," or, as Dr. Gull emphasizes it, "the grand _questio
vexata_ of the day." It expressly declares that "the primordial germs of
all plant-life (and, inferentially of all life) are in themselves (_i.e._
each after its kind) upon the earth," and we have only to supplement this
physiological statement with the "necessary incidence of conditions," as
formulated by the physicists, to explain every phenomenal fact of life
hitherto occurring upon our globe.