acid, with which to-day our breathing fills the air, tomorrow seeks its way round the world. The date-trees that grow round the falls of the Nile will drink it in by their leaves; the cedars of Lebanon will take of it to add to their stature; the cocoa-nuts of Tahiti will grow rapidly upon it; and the palms and bananas of Japan will change it into flowers. The atmosphere is a great reservoir which supplies the food of living creatures; for the animal feeds on the plant, and the plant sucks in much of its food from the air." And, says Dr Buist, "The atmosphere is a spherical shell which surrounds our earth to a depth unknown to us." Its upper surface cannot be nearer to us than fifty, or further off than five hundred miles. It surrounds us on all sides, yet we see it not; it presses on us with a load of fifteen pounds on every square inch of surface of our bodies, or from seventy to one hundred tons on us in all, yet we do not so much as feel its weight. Softer than the softest down, more impalpable than the finest gossamer, it leaves the cobweb undisturbed, and scarcely stirs the lightest flower that feeds on the dew it supplies; yet it bears the fleets of nations on its wings around the world, and crushes the most refractory substances with its weight. When in motion, its force is sufficient to level the most stately forests and the firmest buildings to the earth, to raise the waters of the ocean into ridges like mountains, and dash the strongest ships to pieces like toys. It warms and cools, by turns, the earth and the living creatures that inhabit it.

How wonderful the preparation for the work about to follow! The clouds to store the waters; the atmosphere to supply air for the nourishment of life and breath to the

plants and higher animals so soon to be placed on the rising earth, the surface of which would be a vast humid hotbed. How perfectly consistent the Mosaic narrative! How strange to the advocates of non-inspiration, how wonderful, how profound, must appear this knowledge of the properties of air, of gases, and of fluids, all unknown by men of science until Galileo's day, two hundred years ago, and now only but imperfectly understood!

During the occurrences of this second day, great portions of the Silurian rocks, grain by grain, particle by particle, for thousands of feet in vertical thickness, were being deposited, and their fossil remains of fucoids, submarine plants, Trilobites, Cephalopods, and other Crustaceans and Molluscs similar in construction and habits to many of our times, afford powerful evidence that similar circumstances, as regards light, atmosphere, and seas, prevailed then as now. An atmosphere must have been formed, or in process of formation, when their lives were organized.

But no plant grew, no tree reared its head towards heaven, there was no spot of dry land whereon to rest the sole of a single foot, all life was submarine, plant and animal; and to many, indeed most, of earth's inhabitants, light and air was a necessity of existence.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE THIRD DAY.

9 ¶ And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

II And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

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BEFORE Considering the works of the third day, it may well to remark that the original Hebrew, translated literally, expresses the command as given in the future, and this applies to all the similar expressions in Genesis, thus-Let there be light, etc., signifies "Light shall be,” "A firmament shall be in the midst of the waters," "The waters under the heaven shall be gathered together," "The earth shall bring forth grass," etc.

We have now to contemplate two connected and consecutive creations-the separation of sea and land, and the clothing of the earth with its mantle of vegetation.

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How plainly the narrative describes the gathering together of the waters! How few consider, for a single moment, how much is included in these words! We are struck with wonder by the grandeur of ocean ever moving, awed by its deep-toned voices, terrified by its fury, delighted with its changing colours reflected from every curling wave-top and fleeting spray, or refreshed by its balmy breezes; but we do not realize its value in the great economy of nature.

Occupying the larger portion of earth's surface, extending to depths supposed equivalent to the mountain elevations of the land, occasionally disastrous to life and property, it not only affords means of easy intercourse with other nations, ministers to comfort and civilization through its numerous marine productions, but is essential to life, animal and vegetable,-purifying, by its constant motions, the atmosphere they breathe, and, from its reservoir, sending off a perpetual supply of vapours which, redistributed by means of the clouds, are the sources of moisture and fertility to the soil. Fickle and unstable as it appears, and in poetry but the synonym for continual change, it is yet more stable and unchanging than the solid earth. Truly it has been said—

"Time writes no wrinkles on thy azure brow;

Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."

Philosophy declares that here and there its depths have altered and are altering, and that sea and land have repeatedly changed places; but its level or quantity have never changed, and its general depths remain ever the same. In the ocean, the laws of nature are exemplified on

a great scale. Gravity keeps it spherical. Equilibrium keeps it in constant motion. Attraction produces the tides. Reflection and Refraction colour it with tints innumerable.

Full of life, it contains forms and organisms of the most interesting, astonishing, and extensive character, beyond the conception of the most fertile imagination. Passing by the vast amount of animal life with which it teems, but which, in numbers, are far exceeded by its microscopic tenants, it may be interesting to contrast two extreme classes in its vegetable life—the Diotomaceæ and Fucus Natans. The former consists of a race of minute vegetable productions which propagate by subdivision, and have the power of withdrawing earthy matter from the waters in which they live, forming a shell or covering indestructible, and gradually accumulating in the bed of the sea. An examination of tracts of land, formerly ocean beds, shows that whole chains of hills, beds of marl, and other soils consist of the earthy remains of these minute plants, discoverable individually only by the microscope.

The latter the Fucus Natans, or floating sea-weedforming the Weedy Sea, or the Mar de Sargasso, of the Phoenicians and Spaniards, occurs in the Atlantic, and occupies areas west of the meridian of Fayal and east of the Bahamas, which, with the transverse band uniting the two portions, is six or seven times larger than that of Germany, covering the ocean as if with a mantle. Its stems have been observed by Lamouroux more than 800 feet in length.

At first thought, it might be imagined that the millions