The considerations upon which I base this conclusion are of the simplest possible character.  The Miltonic hypothesis contains assertions of a very definite character relating to the succession of living forms.  It is stated that plants, for example, made their appearance upon the third day, and not before.  And you will understand that what the poet means by plants are such plants as now live, the ancestors, in the ordinary way of propagation of like by like, of the trees and shrubs which flourish in the present world.  It must needs be so; for, if they were different, either the existing plants have been the result of a separate origination since that described by Milton, of which we have no record, nor any ground for supposition that such an occurrence has taken place; or else they have arisen by a process of evolution from the original stocks.

In the second place, it is clear that there was no animal life before the fifth day, and that, on the fifth day, aquatic animals and birds appeared.  And it is further clear that terrestrial living things, other than birds, made their appearance upon the sixth day, and not before.  Hence, it follows that, if, in the large mass of circumstantial evidence as to what really has happened in the past history of the globe we find indications of the existence of terrestrial animals, other than birds, at a certain period, it is perfectly certain that all that has taken place since that time must be referred to the sixth day.

In the great Carboniferous formation, whence America derives so vast a proportion of her actual and potential wealth, in the beds of coal which have been formed from the vegetation of that period, we find abundant evidence of the existence of terrestrial animals.  They have been described, not only by European but by your own naturalists.  There are to be found numerous insects allied to our cockroaches.  There are to be found spiders and scorpions of large size, the latter so similar to existing scorpions that it requires the practised eye of the naturalist to distinguish them.  Inasmuch as these animals can be proved to have been alive in the Carboniferous epoch, it is perfectly clear that, if the Miltonic account is to be accepted, the huge mass of rocks extending from the middle of the Palaeozoic formations to the uppermost members of the series, must belong to the day which is termed by Milton the sixth.  But, further, it is expressly stated that aquatic animals took their origin upon the fifth day, and not before; hence, all formations in which remains of aquatic animals can be proved to exist, and which therefore testify that such animals lived at the time when these formations were in course of deposition, must have been deposited during or since the period which Milton speaks of as the fifth day.  But there is absolutely no fossiliferous formation in which the remains of aquatic animals are absent.  The oldest fossils in the Silurian rocks are exuviae of marine animals; and