Principal Dawson tells us, with
regard to Mollusks existing in a sub-fossil state in the Post-pliocene
clays of Canada, that "after carefully studying about two hundred
species, and of some of these, many hundreds of specimens, I have
arrived at the conclusion that they are absolutely unchanged.... Here
again we have an absolute refusal, on the part of all these animals, to
admit that they are derived, or have tended to sport into new
species."[51]
On the previous page he says, "Pictet catalogues ninety-eight species of
mammals which inhabited Europe in the Post-glacial period. Of these
fifty-seven still exist unchanged, and the remainder have disappeared.
Not one can be shown to have been modified into a new form, though some
of them have been obliged, by changes of temperature and other
conditions, to remove into distant and now widely separated regions."
A second fact which attests the primordial character and fixedness of
species is, that every species as it first appears, is not in a
transition state between one form and another, but in the perfection of
its kind. Science has indeed discovered an ascending order in creation,
which agrees marvellously with that given in the book of Genesis: first,
vegetable productions; then the moving creatures in the sea; then
terrestrial animals; and finally man. Naturalists, who utterly reject
the Scriptures as a divine revelation, speak with the highest admiration
of the Mosaic account of the creation, as compared with any other
cosmogony of the ancient world.
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