Cuvier framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts of the catacombs were identical in every respect with the animals of the same kind that live now.

But what, it has been asked, is a brief period of 3,000 years, when compared with the geologic ages?
Or how could any such argument be founded on a basis so little extended?
It is, however, to no such narrow basis that we can refer in the case of these woods.

All human history is comprised in the nearer corner of the immense period they measure out; and yet from their first appearance in creation till now, they have not altered a single fiber.

And such on this point is the invariable testimony of Paleontologic science, testimony so invariable that no great Paleontologist was ever yet an asserter of the Development Hypothesis."[18] To the same purpose let us hear Huxley's testimony, since no one will suspect him of undue respect for Moses: "Obviously if the earliest fossiliferous rocks now known are coeval with the commencement of life, and if their contents give us any just conception of the earliest fauna and flora, the insignificant amount of modification which can be demonstrated to have taken place in any one group of animals and plants, is quite incompatible with the hypothesis that all living forms are the results of a process of necessary progressive development entirely comprised within the time represented by the fossiliferous rocks."[19] We are fully warranted, then, in alleging, that no such transmutation of species is known to science, as an existing fact, or as having ever occurred.
As to the supposition on which the evolutionists fall back, that such a miracle might have happened thousands of millions of years before the formation of the lowest rocks known to us, we might well decline the discussion of may-be's as facts of science.
But there is a positive denial of unimaginable periods of time for Mr.
Darwin's evolution to try its blundering experiments.

We are empowered to say positively, No! There is no such length of time for you, Mr.
Darwin, on this little globe at least.