Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/643

Rh of the first plant-life, and to the colossal operations by which the earth was fitted for them all? Mr. Huxley knows very well that it would be in the highest degree irrational to ascribe this correct distribution to the doctrine of chances; nor will the stone of Sisyphus of itself constitute a sufficient answer to inquiries which are founded, not upon a fanciful attempt to equate every word of the Proem with every dictum of science, but upon those principles of probable reasoning by which all rational lives are and must be guided.

I find the latest published authority on geology in the Second or Mr. Etheridge's volume of the Manual of Professor Phillips, and by this I will now proceed to test the six-fold series which I have ventured upon presenting.

First, however, looking back for a moment to a work, obviously of the highest authority, on the geology of its day, I find in it a table of the order of appearance of animal life upon the earth, which, beginingbeginning [sic] with the oldest, gives us—

I omit all reference to specifications, and speak only of the principal lines of division.

In the Phillips-Etheridge Manual, beginning as before with the oldest, I find the following arrangement, given partly by statement and partly by diagram:

1. "The Azoic or Archæan time of Dana;" called pre-Cambrian by other physicists (pp. 3, 5).

2. A commencement of plant-life indicated by Dana as anterior to invertebrate animal life; long anterior to the vertebrate forms, which alone are mentioned in Genesis (pp. 4, 5).

3. Three periods of invertebrate life.

4. Age of fishes.

5. Age of reptiles.

6. Age of mammals, much less remote.

7. Age of man, much less remote than mammals.

As to birds, though they have not a distinct and separate age assigned them, the Manual (vol. i. ch. xxv. pp. 511-20) supplies us very clearly with their place in "the succession of animal life." We are here furnished with the following series, after the fishes: 1. Fossil reptiles (p. 512); 2. Ornithosauria (p. .517); they were "flying animals, which combined the characters of reptiles with those of birds;" 3. The first birds of the secondary rocks with "feathers in all respects similar to those of existing birds" (p. 518); 4. Mammals (p. 520).