Nothing could be more natural than such a belief, and nothing could be further removed from the actual truth.

On the contrary, a very slight acquaintance with geology shows us, in the words of Sir John Herschel, that "the actual configuration of our continents and islands, the coast-lines of our maps, the direction and elevation of our mountain-chains, the courses of our rivers, and the soundings of our oceans, are not things primordially arranged in the construction of our globe, but results of successive and complex actions on a former state of things; _that_, again, of similar actions on another still more remote; and so on, till the original and really permanent state is pushed altogether out of sight and beyond the reach even of imagination; while on the other hand, a similar, and, as far as we can see, interminable vista is opened out for the future, by which the habitability of our planet is secured amid the total abolition on it of the present theatres of terrestrial life." Geology, then, teaches us that the physical features which now distinguish the earth's surface have been produced as the ultimate result of an almost endless succession of precedent changes.
Palaeontology teaches us, though not yet in such assured accents, the same lesson.

Our present animals and plants have not been produced, in their innumerable forms, each as we now know it, as the sudden, collective, and simultaneous birth of a renovated world.

On the contrary, we have the clearest evidence that some of our existing animals and plants made their appearance upon the earth at a much earlier period than others.

In the confederation of animated nature some races can boast of an immemorial antiquity, whilst others are comparative _parvenus_.