attest, (1) a succession of inundations, continuing for vast periods of time; and (2) a variety of fiery convulsions powerful enough to rend and shatter the rocks from their foundations, and change the whole face of nature where they prevailed.

(2.) In examining more closely the composition of the rocks, stratified and unstratified, the latter are found to contain no fossils-no remains of plants, fishes, or animals of any kind; nothing that bears the semblance of ever having been anything else but stone, with the exception of the metals fused and run into their crannies and chinks. The stratified rocks, on the contrary, are almost wholly composed of materials that have once formed portions of other organisations. Plants, fishes, shells, reptiles, birds, and animals, are found in them in profusion, converted into stone, but so little altered as to demonstrate that these forms were once endued with vegetable and animal life. They flourished when the strata on which they now rest formed the surface of the earth; were destroyed in the inundation that ensued; and were deposited, along with the other materials held in suspension by the superincumbent waters, to form, in their turn, the floor of another set of inhabitants.

(3.) Further, these fossil remains prove to be of creatures of which the whole species have now become extinct; and, again, the species in the lower strata are different from those in the higher. Hence, not only has the globe undergone several successive changes of its material surface, but the plants and animals have changed also. Each time the surface was renewed, a new system of vegetable and animal life was called into existence, suited to the new condition of the soil. In one period, the fossils are all

of marine plants and fishes, indicating that dry land had not, as yet, emerged from the all-embracing ocean. At another, we have large monsters of the lizard or saurian kind, suggestive of vast marshes and low banks, suited to their amphibious formation. At another, the scaly lizard is found lifted into an unwieldly quadruped, roaming the earth, now hard enough for its tread, and eating down the vegetation that grew thick and rank in the reeking atmosphere. Then we find birds, vast as dragons, and hideous as harpies, all apparently belonging to their several dates or periods, and all anterior to the existing creation, no fossil remains of man having yet been found amongst the fossils of extinct plants and animals.

(4.) Such, briefly stated, are some of the wellascertained facts of geology, and they are in strict accordance with the sacred records in two important respects. (i.) They go to the root of the notion in which atheism has always originated, and to which it is recurring-the eternity of the world. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth;" so that, as Paul says," we understand that the worlds were framed by the power of God"—"so that things which are seen were not made of things that do appear." Natural philosophy has argued for a creating mind from the proofs of design impressed upon all creation. Geology more directly proves it by producing evidence of the pre-existing state of things. It does not present us with a single piece of mechanism, but with a succession of creations, occupying each its distinct period of time, and for that time possessing the whole earth. This evidence is not moral, but physical and complete. The theory of "development" is here wholly inapplicable, inasmuch as the successive races were manifestly not

developed out of their predecessors, but brought to a violent end, and their habitations prepared for successors of another species. Such revolutions can be ascribed only to the hand of a Superior Being, existing before and after the formations. He moulded the subject matter with the power of the potter over the clay. This is the first and decisive testimony which geological science bears to the truths of revelation. The next is

(5.) That man is found in geology as he is exhibited in Genesis-the latest in time, but the highest in order, of all the creatures that have, as yet, appeared upon this earth. Geology demonstrates that the Scriptural account of man's position upon earth is the true one-that while among the extinct species of the pre-Adamite periods there can be traced the idea of the human organisation, rudely stamped on the first living creatures, preserved amid the destruction of races, and reproduced on a higher scale in their successors, man himself was wanting, till, after several successive creations, the earth was again reorganised for his use. Approximations towards man's material organism are found throughout the geologic periods; but a distinct line separates the head and capital from the lower members. And this line is drawn in geology (as it is in anatomy also), precisely where it is in Genesis-with the creation of Adam. It was after all the preliminary periods of creation-after the formation of the present surface of the earth, and its being stocked with all other existing creatures,—that this one superior rational species was introduced, as the crown and perfection of the whole. This testimony not only sustains the very letter of the Mosaic records, but leads directly to the conclusion, that the being so

exceptionally endowed may well be reserved for the exalted destiny there assigned to him. The voice. of science is attuned to that of revelation

"Through all the compass of the notes it ran,

The diapason ending full in man."

A new impulse has lately been given to the question of man's antiquity in relation to the earth; and Science has been exulting in the triumphs she fancies she is winning over the records of Revelation. The tendency of modern science is painfully manifest in its constant and ever-watchful attitude of hostility to everything that connects itself with the evidences of a spiritual world; and above all things, of course, to the Bible. The stump of a fossil tree, the bones of an extinct animal, a broken skull found in some inexplicable place, but requiring a solution equally from our assailants; nay, a potsherd, a sea-shell, the piles of a lake-village, the rudiments of stone instruments-all things-anything-are heavy enough to turn the scale in favour of what is called reason. And we are ridiculed as fearing or opposed to science, as narrow-minded and hood-winked, for not at once adopting this confused mass of immature geognosy, and sacrificing, in honour of our acceptance, whatsoever has been to us venerable, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame, whatsoever true and just, whatsoever has been hitherto to us the light of our eyes or the joy of our hearts, that has made us and kept us virtuous, hopeful, consoled, happy through our dark or rugged way on earth, and has sustained our heads above the billows, and our souls above the troubles, the anxieties, and the anguishes of life. We have before us a prescriptive authority in records of several thousand years

ago, discussed, disputed, and always victorious, running down a channel that seems scooped out for it through primæval rivers, lined with monuments, beyond which man has left no articulate monument cuneiform or hieroglyphic: all marvellously attesting, by consenting and concurrent testimony, the accuracy of those sacred volumes; then interwoven with what the west considered ancient and the east modern-the annals of the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ till the stream of primitive history, with its evidence of prophecy, still in course of verification, drops silently into that deeper, nobler, and more magnificent reservoir, where it mingles with the pure and living waters of a new dispensation, whence it issues with all the new qualities-evidences, proofs, and applications which are concentrated here, where we meet with such a strange, superhuman, overweight of proof as seems to master every possible objection, and to leave no alternative for a second solution. For in addition to all the miraculous works and prophetic sayings, and new moral precepts, a fresh philosophy, theology, and social code, issuing from illiterate men, in the midst of a most brilliant age and accepted,-we have to throw into the balance the vastest empire ever known, subdued when at its greatest might; the entire world reformed, transformed into a new condition, by a new legislature, promulgated by ignorant men, propagated by poor men, proved and pressed on acceptance by men in prison and in the stocks, under the scourge and the knife, on the rack and the gridiron; till the whole empire and the entire globe rolled spontaneously to the feet of a Galilean crucified on the cross! Have we not a right to put all these grave and solemn considerations against a solitary cranium, an antiquated