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Many thousands of years sink into a trifling period, for the passing through of these processes.]

"If I travel in Greece, I may find monuments of ancient art perhaps under the foundations of a Turkish house. If I compared these works of art with those of the present day, I should be convinced at once (quite independently of history,) that they belonged to a different epoch in the annals of the human race. These changes are partly due to the progress of civilization, the caprice of man's will, and other moral causes; still, however, subordinate to certain laws. In the geological case, the total change in organic forms has been brought about by the slow operation of physical causes, not under the control of man. But he can observe them; and, because they are Laws, that is, have the impress of MIND upon them, he can interpret them. Those who argue against you as some of your opponents do, not only deprive man of his intellectual privilege, but strip the GOD of nature of his honour."

See pp. 403 and 409. as a new conglomerate, of great thickness, separating the old slaterocks from the Mountain Limestone. But, even in this form and without fossils, it demonstrates that the older strata were solid and perfected before the existence of the Mountain Limestone.

"The Old Red Sandstone often appears

66

Again; there was a total change in the inhabitants of the sea, between the Limestone-beds and Coral-reefs of the Silurian and Cambrian periods, and the time when the Mountain Limestone was deposited. Hence, we should conclude that there was a very long lapse of time, between the period of the highest Silurian beds and the period of the Mountain Limestone. This inference is confirmed by very modern discoveries. In Scotland, in the country examined by Mr. Murchison [the Silurian region,] and above all in North and South Devon, the Old Red Sandstone contains innumerable regular beds, with fossils which have lived and died where we find them; that is, in the same relative situation, as of course they [with the entire sea-bottom mass in which had been their habitation,] had been lifted bodily out of the sea by elevatory forces. Subordinate to it are lines upon lines of old Coral-reefs and other calcareous masses, full of organic structures, and indicating most emphatically long periods of time. The organic types [in this Old Red] are of an intermediate character, between the types of the Silurian and Cambrian and the types of the Mountain Limestone.

EE

"Every thing indicates a very long and very slow progression :one creation flourishing and performing its part, and gradually dying off as it has so performed its part; and another actual creation of new beings, not derived as progeny from the former, gradually taking its place; and again this new creation succeeded by a third.Nothing per saltum; all according to law and order; all bearing the impress of MIND, a great dominant will, at the bidding of which all parts of nature have their peculiar movements, their periods of revolution, their rise and fall.”

"These alternations of Limestone beds [see above, page 398,] full of fossils (shells and zoophytes,) prove the slow progression of the series. Each Limestone bed must have taken a long time for its formation, yet many of them alternate with beds of Coal. There are regular shell-beds in the Coal-strata, stretching scores of miles. These shells often have both valves united, like common living muscles on the sea-shore; and [thus it is shewn that they] have not been transported. They prove that a few inches of strata required a time equal to the lives of several generations of these muscles.— Many of the fossil-plants appear not to have drifted from the spots where they grew; and we have enormous trees, with rings of growth marking their great age: all in the Coal-fields. Yet all the plants are absolutely of extinct species, though of a structure that allows a botanist to reason on their habits. The God of nature is 'without variableness or shadow of turning.' Different species were created to suit different conditions of the earth, air, and sea: but the organs of life were the same; and of their modes of growth, nutrition, reproduction, &c. &c., animal or vegetable, we can reason as well as if we saw them. For there are great dominant laws of organic life which mark ONE MIND; the very Mind that made us, and has given us eyes to see, and souls in part able to comprehend, the great MasterMind himself, and his ways of working out his will. To deny us the power of drawing inferences from God's laws, is to strip us of the best thing left us in our fallen state, and all creation of its glory.

"In passing through the New Red Sandstone to the Oolitic series of formations, again there is a complete change in all the forms of organic life; and there is the same proof of a very long lapse of time, that we have in descending from the Tertiary to the Chalk, or in passing [by ascending] from the Silurian to the Carboniferous epoch."

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"In the superficial gravel containing rolled blocks of stone, coming from vast distances, we find bones of elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, &c. &c. of extinct species, mingled with bones of mammals of known species; but not a single fragment of a human bone, or a single trace of any human work. Some have referred this gravel to the Noachian Deluge. It cannot be of any newer date but the safest way is to draw no conclusions not founded on physical evidence; and, as different regions have been elevated at different periods, it seems probable that there must have been many periods for the formation of gravel, some, at least, long anterior to that last act of creation by which, a fit habitation being at length prepared for him, MAN and a new creation of beings were called into existence by that Hand which had ordained and regulated all the previous movements."

The inquirer will do well to study Dr. Grant's (Prof. Compar. Anat. Univ. Coll. Lond.) General View of the Characters and the Distribution of the Extinct Animals, in the British Scientific Annual, edited by Dr. Thomson, for 1839, pp. 222—281. I cite the con

cluding paragraph.

"The unity of the plan of organization, and the regular succession of animal forms, point out a beginning of this great kingdom on the surface of our globe, although the earliest stages of its developement may now be effaced; and the continuity of the series through all geological epochs, and the gradual transitions which connect the species of one formation with those of the next in succession, distinctly indicate that they form the parts of one creation, and not the heterogeneous remnants of successive kingdoms begun and destroyed: so that, while they present the best records of the changes which the surface of the globe has undergone, they likewise afford the best testimony of the recent origin of the present crust of our planet, and of all its organic inhabitants."

The observant reader will perceive that, in Dr. Grant's application of the word creation, he differs in phrase only, not in doctrine, from Mr. Sedgwick and Mr. John Phillips.

[F.]

Referred to at page 277.

THE following extracts are valuable and interesting, as they shew the impression made upon the mind of an able Bible critic, the elder Rosenmüller, at a time when geological researches were little known, and when Werner, at the age of 25, was but just beginning his career. He was far from the opinion which his son promulgated, fifteen years after, treading in the steps of Simplicius (in the sixth century,) and Hetzel, Hase, and others in our own times, that Moses derived his history of the creation from the Egyptians. The resemblance is indeed remarkable: but I think it is much more rationally accounted for by supposing that the Egyptian and Phenician traditions had flowed from a common source, the family of Noah; and that Moses, under the direction of divine inspiration, placed at the commencement of his great work the very written documents of primeval men which had descended in the Abrahamic line, and which were the genuine records whence the other traditions had been derived.

"The enemies of religion act a very inequitable part when they require of us such explications of all chronological and historical difficulties, as should leave no portion of doubt remaining. Can it surprise any man that, in the most ancient of all writings, many things should be obscure to us, who live in times so extremely remote ?- -In consequence of the great advances which have been made in modern times, in Hebrew and Greek philology and the languages and antiquities of the east, no small number of dark and difficult passages have been satisfactorily elucidated, so as to make it perfectly clear that most objections have been engendered by ignorance.Every good writer must be presumed to speak according to the custom of the men among whom he lived, and their common use of language.--I shall not meddle with the question, whether the contents of the beginning of Genesis were by God revealed immediately to Moses; or that he derived them from more ancient records. -The style, and the entire manner of the description, involve evidence of the highest antiquity. At every step we perceive proofs of that extreme simplicity which must have been the character of our race in its very infancy. With respect to divine

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subjects, in particular, the first step of human knowledge must undoubtedly have consisted in conceptions of God derived from our own nature; ascribing to the Deity the same properties and perfections which men perceived in themselves, but in modes and degrees infinitely more perfect. Upon this principle are founded the representations of God which are given in the books of Moses, and many other parts of the Old Testament. Indeed this is, in my judgment, a very plain argument, not only of the genuineness and truth of those books, but of their DIVINE origin: seeing that they present to us a method of description concerning God and divine things, perfectly suited to the capacity of men in the earliest times, and yet the most sublime, and, when fairly and candidly interpreted, in perfect accordance with spiritual truth. The scoffers at revealed religion, philosophers as they please to call themselves, betray an almost unpardonable ignorance, when they make stumbling-blocks out of those constantly occurring expressions of the Old Testament which speak of the Deity [anthropopathicis locutionibus] in language borrowed from human properties and actions. What can be a grosser absurdity, and even folly, than to require that Moses and the prophets should have spoken of divine truths, in the very infancy of the human race, according to the philosophy of Descartes, Newton, or Wolf?

"In the beginning God created this universe; the heavens and the earth. But, with respect to this earthly globe, it was not at once the abode of men and animals, as it is now: but there was a period during which it was utterly destitute of such a furniture of things as it now possesses, it did not enjoy the light of the sun, and it was completely covered with water. Whether, at its first being brought into being, it possessed a constitution like that of comets,* being consequently uninhabitable; or whether it was reduced into its actual state, after a vast space of time, by some kind of universal inundation of water, with the concurrence of other causes both natural and extraordinary; cannot be with certainty determined from the Mosaic narrative. But this detracts nothing from the truth and dignity of the narrative. It never was in the mind or intention of Moses, to unfold physical causes, of which he

* One cannot but observe here the working of a sagacious mind, and the approach which it makes, though on principles purely conjectural, to the Nebular Hypothesis.