Page:The Philosophy of Creation.djvu/38

 Flora of Egypt some four thousand years old, covered by the dry sands, has been brought to our view. It differs not as to a grain of pollen from the flora of Egypt to-day. Evolution argues a perpetual change, but we can go back four thousand years and show that there has not been the slightest variation in the species of certain plants. It is true, indeed, that there have been changes in the flora of countries; yet the evidence is not that the changes are the effects of Evolution, but quite to the contrary. Such changes have been the results of radical changes of the earth's condition, whereupon a new kind supplanted the former. The fact that the law of Evolution does not now exist, and has not for several thousand years, makes it conclusive that it never did. An obsolete natural law is irreconcilable with anything that we know or can conceive.

Since no instance of one genus being derived from another is known, and the law of Evolution is not now operative, the acceptance of that law requires a belief in the existence of a supposed, obsolete natural law, in supposed facts to which the law is applied, and in a purely theoretical application of the supposed law to the supposed facts. It would seem as easy to believe in the old doctrine of creation out of nothing by the fiat of the Omnipotent as to accept a theory based upon