But instead of that we discover, away down in the Silurian strata, at the very beginning of life, _all the four kingdoms_--the radiates, the mollusks, the articulates, and the fish! Evidently, then, there was no such beginning of the world as evolutionists suppose.
Then as we work upward along the line of march, and of the development of the divine idea, we observe that when new species were introduced, they did not work up slowly from small and weak beginnings; beginning with dwarfs and growing up to giants; but, on the contrary, the giants head the column.

The geological books are full of them--sharks forty feet long, frogs as big as oxen, ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus of fabulous proportions--were not their skeletons preserved--pterodactyles, or bats, as big as a dog, the mastodon giganteus, beside which an ordinary modern elephant is like a Shetland pony beside a dray horse, ferns as big as oak trees, and mosses eighteen inches in diameter, shell fish of the nautilus order the size of dinner plates, and crustaceans, cousins to the lobster, three feet long.

And all this at the very first start in life of these respective families, and in overwhelming multitudes.

That was no age of small beginnings, and small progressive improvements.

On the contrary, these old families, like some other old families, seem to have rather lost rank, and bulk, and influence; at least their modern representatives cut no such figure in the world as their predecessors.
As we proceed along the line we meet gaps which slay the theory of genealogical descent altogether.