Who shall say, then, that in that immensely remote and long-protracted
era--the Eocene period--in which the gigantic elephantoids first made
their appearance, there did not exist somewhere, in some one of nature's
more cunning and prolific recesses, the exact plasmic conditions necessary
for the appearance of the mastodon? If they existed anywhere (which is
concessively possible), with the necessary environment (also concessively
possible), then the mastodon could no more help wallowing out of his
essential plasma than the earth can help responding to its axial motion.
All things are framed in the prodigality of nature, and she never commits
an abortion upon herself. If both the conditions and necessary environment
were at any time present, as they must have been on the materialistic
theory, the mastodon is just as easily accounted for as the first fungus,
or the first fungus-spore. [10]

All physicists, as well as physiologists, agree that individual species of
both plants and animals have _disappeared_ from the earth for the want of
the "necessary conditions" under which they once lived and flourished.
What greater fallacy is there, then, in the assumption that they
originally _appeared_ from the presence of these identical conditions,
whatever they may have been, and whenever they may have occurred? We put
this question not simply because the Bible Genesis asserts that "_out of
the ground_ made the Lord God to grow" every plant of the field "before it
was in the earth," as well as every herb of the field "before it grew;"
nor because it declares that their primordial germs are in the earth; nor
because it speaks of the earth as containing within itself the "animating
principle of life." But we put it on the irrefragable logic of the
materialist's own premises and conclusions. They may use other and
different physiological terms from what we should care to employ, but
their "correlates of motion," their "molecular force," their "highly