fact as regards vegetables? If so, shall we not find that the nearer we approach the beginning, the ruder will the forms become, and the fewer the genera in proportion to the species? This is what Mr. Darwin taught. Are there facts to sustain this theory? If so they must be found in the ancient rocks. The appeal is to geology. So far is geology from sustaining this view that it antagonizes it. Mr. Darwin felt the need of bringing geology into court as the witness that must know more of this matter than any other, and his witness so contradicted his theory that he was under the painful necessity of discrediting his own witness. (See "Origin of Species," Chapter X.) Professor Huxley says in the "Encyclopædia Britannica," ninth edition :

The only perfectly safe foundation for the doctrines of evolution is in the historical, or rather archæological evidence, that particular organisms have arisen by the gradual modifications of their predecessors, which is furnished by fossil remains.

We have the statement by the eminent

the existence of the plant and animal forms, but as yet they have disclosed nothing whatever as to how these forms originated.

VII. TESTIMONY OF THE DAKOTA GROUP.

On this subject there is a great volume in the library of the Rock Books of nature, from which much instruction may be gained. There is what is called the Dakota Group, a formation of sandstone, described by Lesquereux as consisting of "reddish and yellow sandstone, with variously-colored clays, seams of impure lignite, and remains of fossil plants, the whole group holding a position at the base of the cretaceous series of the Northwest.' If it occupied only a square mile, this Dakota group would be well worth the study of naturalists, but it extends continuously from Texas to Greenland, and is from sixty to one hundred miles in breadth. Its fossil plants have been studied by American and European naturalists, including some who are acknowledged to be among the ablest naturalists in the

world. The number of plant impressions is vast. The Rev. Mr. Harsha* says:

So far as is known, there is no place on the earth where such precise and varied testimony can be gathered as to the relation between the flora of the present and that of the past in this formation.

Professor Wilber says:

The leaves here preserved in stone are so perfect that the skilled botanist at once recognizes every species, and makes his classification as readily as if he were dealing in the daily contributions gathered by a class in botany from our common groves in the month of June (see Wilber's "Nebraska ").

Now, what do scientific men find in this great formation? Four things, every one of which suggests a difficulty which must be removed before any known theory of evolution can be accepted as proved.

1. It is manifestly essential to the evolution theory that the older any formation is, the smaller must be the number of genera in proportion to species. It follows that "in

* Rev. William J. Harsha, A. M., contributed a brief but unusually important paper on the Dakota Group to the Presbyterian Review, January, 1883, to which amplest acknowledgment of indebtedness is made.

the older we should find few and simple generic forms." "The few simple genera and many species should be prior to the many complex general and the comparatively meagre species." This is the theory of evolution. But nature flatly contradicts it, and over a continent, with capital letters a hundred miles high, writes, UNTRUE! According to the geologists the Dakota group is five million years old; and in this old cretaceous formation, therefore, if evolution were true, the forms should be disorderly, and the genera few and the species many; whereas, everything is complete, the genera well marked, and the proportion of the genera to the species is as 72 to 130-not quite two species to each genus. Does not this one fact seem fatal to the acceptance of the evolution. theory as it now stands?

2. If evolution be true, the flora of any one formation will have a perceptible connection with the flora of the next and more ancient formation from which it was evolved. But here, over thousands of square miles, we find a flora absolutely perfect, existing

without any primordial germ or type out of which it could have been evolved. The characteristics of this flora is the dicotyledon leaf. It is not scarce, but appears in measureless abundance. Now, that perfect leaf has been supposed by evolutionist naturalists to have been evolved through ages from ruder types, and to have made its first appearance certainly not earlier than the middle cretaceous formation, if so early. early. But here we find it far back in the Dakota group, and as perfect as it can be. The same is true of the other types in this group: they all come forth in perfection at their first appearance." It is not said that they were created. We are not to account for their appearance. But they are a gross impertinence to evolution. They came unevolved, and they came to stay; and they have stayed through these millenniums, and so long as they are there, if there were not another fact in nature antagonistic to the evolution theory, would not this be fatal?

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3. The theory of evolution necessarily involves the agreement of any flora with the flora of any similar group. Similar groups