The Testimony of the Rocks / or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed

by Hugh Miller

Let me first remark, that no one need expect to be original simply by being absurd. There is a cycle in nonsense, as certainly as in opinion of a more solid kind, which ever and anon brings back the delusions and errors of an earlier time: the follies of the present day are transcripts, unwittingly produced, and with of course a few variations, of follies which existed centuries ago; and it seems to be on this principle,—a consequence, mayhap, of the limited range of the human mind, not only in its elucidations of truth, but also in its forms of error,—that scarce an explanation of geologic phenomena has been given by the anti-geologists of our own times, that was not anticipated by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was held, for instance,—in opposition to the great painter, Leonardo da Vinci, who flourished early in the sixteenth century, and was one of the first who, after the revival of learning, asserted the true character of organic remains,—that fossils were formed in the rocks through the planetary influences, or a certain plastic force in nature, and had never entered into the composition of living creatures or plants. And this view obtained very generally till about the middle of the seventeenth century, when, save for a brief space long after, in the times of Voltaire, it ceased to be regarded as any longer tenable. Curiously enough, however, it was virtually reproduced by one of the extant anti-geologists,—a clergyman of the English Church,—only three years ago, in a publication written, he says, to counteract "the immense mischief occasioned by the infidel works of geologists, especially among the lower classes," and which he has termed "a brief and complete refutation" of their "anti-scriptural theory."[37] "Fossils," says this courageous writer, "were not necessarily animated structures:" some of them were in all probability "formed of stone from the very first;" others, of inanimate flesh and bone. "The mammoth found under the ice in arctic regions had not necessarily been a living creature: it was created under the ice, and then preserved in that peculiar form of preservation, instead of being transmuted into stone, like the rest of its class." Such was the state of keeping of this famous mammoth, when discovered a little ere the beginning of the present century, that, as I had occasion formerly to remark, dogs and bears fed upon its flesh; and its bones, and part of its skin, covered with long red hair, are now in the museum of Petersburg. But there is no evidence whatever, according to this writer, that it had ever been a living creature: it was simply a created carcass. All organisms are, he holds, models or archetypes, fashioned during the first day in the depths of chaos, to typify or foreshadow the living plants and animals that were to be called into existence a few days later. "What," he asks, "do the cocoa-nuts, melons, and gourds, which have been found in the strata, show, but that the vegetable had its perfect archetype in chaos as well as the animal?" Nay, further, the geologist has but got into the apartment in which the original architect stored up his plans and models,—many of them, however, rejected ones. For "though every animal is formed after his archetype," we find him saying, "the converse is not true, that every chaotic structure is represented by its living facsimile." But they typify, if not living organisms, much more important things,—"they represent," says our writer, "the land of the shadow of death;" and the strata containing them, which geologists have opened, are symbolical of the "gates of death." "The state of preservation in which most fossils are, instead of having mouldered away, foreshadows immortality. The gradation, too, from the organisms whose types are said to be lost or destroyed, and confused in innumerable heaps, up to the perfect and complete specimen, is no fanciful representation of the resurrection; while the isolated bones and parts of skeletons which, though found far apart, as they were created, have been fitted together by the skill of the accomplished anatomist, give assurance of the fact that our scattered dust—our membra disjecta—shall come together at the sound of the last trump." And this is "geology on Scripture principles," soberly expounded by a man who respects facts, while he gives no place to fancy.

The "English clergyman" then goes on to show in his pamphlet, that the Coal Measures furnish no evidence of the earth's antiquity. They were formed, he says, by the finger of the Creator, "immediately and at once. A carboniferous tree of gigantic size has been discovered," he adds, "in the interior of the earth, of such a shape as entirely to prove the absurdity of a theory [that of the earth's antiquity] which has not a single valid argument to support it. It is described as having its trunk rising from the earth perpendicularly ten feet, and then bending over and extending horizontally sixty feet. Now, what living tree thus lopsided could support such a weight in such a direction? It seems to have been created on purpose to silence the HORRID BLASPHEMIES of geologists; for it proves to a demonstration, that the upper, nether, and surrounding matter came into existence with it at the same instant; for how else could it have been preserved in such a position?" The triumph secured by the carboniferous tree, however,—though it does not seem wholly impossible that a tree might in any age of the world have been broken over some ten feet from its root, and bent in a horizontal position,—seems in some danger of being neutralized, as we read on, by the circumstance that geologists find not unfrequently, among their fossils, the dung of the carnivorous vertebrates, charged in many instances with the teeth, bones, and scales of the creatures on which they had preyed, and strongly impressed, in at least the coprolites of the larger Palæozoic ganoids, and of the enaliosaurs of the Secondary period, by the screw-like markings of a spiral intestine, similar in form to that now exemplified by the sharks and rays. And in maintaining his hypothesis that most fossils are mere archetypes—mere plans or models—of existences to be, the archetypal dung proves rather a stumbling-block, and the English clergyman waxes exceedingly wroth against the geologists. "We cannot," he says, "believe in such things as coprolites. They are only a curious form of matter commanded by Him who has made the flower to assume all shapes as well as all hues. He who would not allow so much as a tool to be lifted up on the stones that composed his altar, would certainly not allow the work of animals to compose his creation, much less, then, their dung. The geological assertion that the Creator of this world formed it in some parts of coprolites savors very much of Satan or Beelzebub, the god of dung. Geologists could scarcely have made a more unfortunate self-refuting assertion than this." I question, however, whether the clergyman does well to be angry with the geologists here. That fossils are mere models and archetypes, is his hypothesis, not theirs; and so it is he himself who is answerable, not they, for what he deems the impiety of the archetypal dung. His next statement is of a kind suited somewhat to astonish the practical geologist. "It is the constant language of geologists," he says, in giving the result of their discoveries, "that no young have been found!!! while the larger fossils have been detected isolated, or in the company of others, all differing in kind." "Archetypal resemblances of ova have been found, and such things as moths; but these are distinct and perfect in their kind. The occurrence of the young, which are imperfect, is a fact which has not been, and never can be, established; therefore it never can be proved that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand years." It is "the constant language of geologists" that "no young have been found" in the fossil state. Amazing assertion! "Therefore it never can be proved that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand years." Astonishing inference! There is not a tyro in geology who ever looked over a set of fossils, or ever spent an hour in exploring a fossiliferous deposit, who does not know that the remains of organisms in every stage of growth may be found lying side by side in the same bed,—that almost every museum contains its series of molluscs, crustaceans, fishes, and corals, formed to illustrate species in their various stages of growth,—that, in especial, among the ammonites of the Secondary ages, and the trilobites of the Palæozoic ones, these series have been made with great care, in order to prevent the erroneous multiplication of species,—and that, in short, every richly fossiliferous stratum in the earth's crust repeats the lesson so often deduced from our churchyards, where graves of all sizes, from that of the infant of a day to that of the aged adult, may be found lying side by side. What the English clergyman represents as "the constant language of geologists," is a language which no geologist ever yet used, or ever will. And his inference is in every way worthy of his premises. The flourish with which he concludes his pamphlet would be infinitely amusing had his language been just a little less solemn. "The writer of the above remarks has felt it his duty," we find him saying, "to publish them, not only to refute the arguments of the vain and puffed-lip geologist, who fancies himself wiser than God, but also to prevent, by God's blessing, the evil that must ensue from tampering with the sacred text. And now, what has Satan to say? Why, THE TABLES ARE TURNED. Let men beware. Why did not the British Association, at their twenty-third meeting, in September, 1853, acknowledge their error as a body, in applauding so loudly the assertion of one of their geological members at a previous meeting, that this earth existed ages before man? They may now have the satisfaction of thinking that, in spite of themselves, those impious plaudits have been turned by the wrath of God into hisses." Strange as the fact may seem, this passage was written, not in grave joke, but in serious earnest.

The belief that fossil remains had never entered into the composition of living organisms, but had been formed in the rocks just as we find them, gradually gave place, during the seventeenth century, to the belief that they were the debris of the Noachian Deluge, and evidences, as they occurred in almost every known country, and were found on the top of lofty hills, of at once its universality and the height to which its waters had prevailed. And this hypothesis, like the others, has been reproduced by some of the anti-geologists of the present day. The known fact,—a result of modern science,—that the several formations (always invariable in their order of succession) have their groups of organisms peculiar to themselves, has, however, interposed a difficulty from which the earlier cosmogonists were exempt. It has become necessary to show that the Noachian cataclysm was strangely selective, in burying in the beds which it is held by the class to have formed, now one group of plants and animals, now quite another group, and anon yet another and different group still; and all this many times repeated with such nice care and discrimination, that not a single organism of the lower beds is to be detected in the middle ones, nor yet a single organism of either the middle or lower in the beds that lie above. Even this task, however, just a little lightened by here and there a suppression of the facts, has been attempted by the redoubtable Dean of York.[38] Fire and water were, he conceives, equally agents in the great catastrophe that destroyed the old world,—a circumstance which, if true, would have furnished with an admirable apology the class of persons who, according to the wit, would have cried out "Fire, fire," at the deluge. The dean conceives that at the commencement of the Flood, when torrents of rain were falling upon the land, numerous submarine volcanoes began to disgorge their molten contents into the sea, destroying the fish, and all other marine productions, by the intensity of the heat, and at the same time locking them up in strata formed of the erupted matter. This process took place ere the land floods, laden with the spoils of island and continent, and the accompanying mud and sand, could arrive at the remoter depths; which, however, they ultimately reached, and formed a second formation, overlying the first. There were thus two formations originated,—a marine formation below, and a terrestrial or fresh water formation above; but as these two deposits could not be made to include all the geological phenomena with which even the dean was acquainted, he had nicely to parcel out the work of his volcanoes on the one hand, and that of his land floods on the other, into separate fits or paroxysms, each of which served to entomb a distinct class of creatures, and originate a definite set of rocks. Thus, the first work of his volcanoes was to form the Transition series of strata. As a commencement of the whole, the internal fire blew up from the bed of the ocean, in tremendous explosions, vast quantities of pulverized rock mixed with clay, which, slowly subsiding, and covering up, as it sank, shells, stone-lilies, and trilobites, formed the Silurian rocks. A second explosion brought up the vents of the volcanoes to the level of the ocean; and while the Old Red Sandstone, thus produced, and charged with fish killed by the heat, was settling on their flanks, they themselves, as if seized by black vomit, began to disgorge in vast quantities, coal in the liquid state. Very opportunely, just ere it cooled, enormous quantities of vegetables, washed out to sea by the extraordinary land floods, were precipitated immediately over it; and, sticking in its viscid surface, or sinking into its substance through cracks formed in it during the cooling, they became attached to it in such considerable masses, as to lead long after to the very mistaken notion that coal itself was of vegetable origin. Then there ensued another deposit of red sand, with salt boiled into it; and then a deposition of lime and clay. The land floods still continuing, the great Sauroid reptiles which had haunted the rivers and lower plains began to yield to their force, and their carcasses, floating out to sea, sank amid the slowly subsiding lime and clay, now known as the Lias. The volcanoes too were still very active; and the lighter shells, ammonites, and the like, which had been previously bobbing up and down on the boiling surface, now sank by myriads; for the viscid argillaceous mud thrown up by the fiery ebullitions from beneath stuck fast to them, and dragged them down. Then came the formation of the Oolite, rolled into little egg-like pellets by the waves; and last of all, the Green sand and Chalk; after which the waters ran off, and sank into the deep hollow which now forms the bed of the ocean, but which previous to the cataclysm had been the place of the land. The dean, as he went on, fell into some little confusion regarding the true place of some of his animals, such as the megatherium, which arrived in his arrangement a little too soon. He spoke, too—if a newspaper report is to be credited—of a heavy creature soon overtaken and drowned by the rising waters, which he termed the pterogactylus, and which does not seem to have turned up, either in the body or out of it, since it was lost on that memorable occasion. Nor did he make any provision in his arrangement for the formation of the various Tertiary deposits. But then all these are slight matters, that could be very easily woven into his hypothesis. As the flood rose along the hill sides, first such of the weightier animals would perish as could not readily climb steep acclivities; and then the oxen, the horses, the deer, and the goats, with the lighter carnivora, who, as they would die last,—some of them not until the final disappearance of the hill-tops,—would of course be entombed in the upper deposits. Such is the hypothesis of the Dean of York,—a hypothesis of which it may be justly affirmed, that it is well nigh as ingenious as the circumstances of the case permit, and against which little else can be urged than that it must seem rather cumbrous and fanciful to the class who do not know geology, and, on the whole, somewhat inadequate to the class who do.

The Flood, however, is not left to do the whole geologic work, by even such of the anti-geologists as assign to it the largest share. A great unrecorded convulsion which accompanied the Fall is held by some of their number to have greatly assisted, by laying down the older formations of the fossiliferous rocks; and very much is said to have been done during the extended antediluvian period that succeeded it. One of perhaps the most amusing though least known of the writers that take this special view is a Scotchman, resident in a secluded provincial town, who for the last twelve or fifteen years has been printing ingenious little books against the infidel geologists, and getting letters of similar character inserted in such of our country newspapers as are ambitious of rendering their science equal to their literature. And from the great trouble which he has taken with the writings of the individual who now addresses you, he seems to regard them as peculiarly unsolid and dangerous. According to this profound cosmogonist, the world before the Fall was rather more than twice its present size, and very artificially constructed.[39] It was a hollow ball, supported inside by a framework of metal wrought into hexagonal reticulations, somewhat like the framework of the great iron bridge over the river Wear at Sunderland; and which had an open space in its centre, occupied by a vast tubular furnace lying direct south and north, which threw out huge volumes of flame towards the poles. Over the reticulated framework there rose a great, thick firmament of metal, which formed the inner shell of the globe; over the metal there lay a considerably thicker shell of granite; and over the granite, a thinner shell of a substance not specified, perhaps not known, but which, from its being completely water-tight, served the purpose of the layer of asphalt or terra cotta which the architect spreads over his flat roofs, or on the tops of his sloping terraces, afterwards to be covered with soil and laid out into gardens. Such, it seems, was that portion of the framework of our great globe which corresponded to the hollow lath and plaster framework of the little globes used in schools; while its uppermost layer,—correspondent with the slips of the map which the geographer pastes on the model and then varnishes,—was formed of earth and water, economically laid out into "most useful and tasteful configurations,"—the earth into pretty little rising grounds and valleys, and the water into seas and lakes of no great extent, but which formed, from their very handsome combinations, "a terraqueous surface all over PERFECTLY PARADISAICAL." Over this exquisitely neat earth there lay an enveloping atmosphere, greatly thinner and less dense than the air at present is, and incapable, in consequence, of being agitated by storms; while directly over the northern and southern extremities of the world the polar auroras, now so fitful and broken, extended in a permanent arch, and gave light, during the long dark winters, to the regions lying below. And as warmth was as necessary to the paradisaical perfection of these districts as light, they received the necessary heat from the great double-acting furnace in the interior, which, belching out flames at both ends, acted powerfully against the polar portions of the metallic crust or shell, and thus maintained the necessary glow in the absence of the sun, on the principle on which a frying-pan or Scotch girdle is heated when placed by the cookmaid over the fire. And such, according to this excellent world-fashioner and very zealous man, was the construction of that unblighted and unbroken earth which was of old pronounced to be "very good." The Fall, however, produced a most remarkable and singularly disastrous change. The earth was somehow partially crushed and broken, contemporaneously with the event,—like a strong fishing basket when it accidentally falls from a coach-top under the wheel; and, from a most interesting colored copperplate that illustrates one of the author's treatises (for he draws as well as he writes), the exact damage which it received can be minutely estimated. The interior network was compressed into all sorts of irregular polygons; the iron firmament was broken into great fragments,—some of which may be seen in the print hanging down into the hollow interior, like patches of broken plaster dangling from a ceiling, suspended by the hairs originally employed to give the necessary tenacity to the lime. The great granitic shell was also broken, but broken so nicely, on the principle of the arch, that the pieces remained in nearly their original places. Finally, vast rents are seen to occur in the cement and soil of the outer crust; and these great rents, which must have formed enormous gulfs and deep interminable ravines, were destined, it would seem, to perform a most important part in the future geology of the globe. Forming impassable lines of demarcation between the several portions into which they broke up the earth's surface, they imprisoned the recently created animals in separate groups, kept as completely from mixing together as the fallow-deer of one loftily-walled park are kept from mixing with the white oxen of another loftily-walled park, or as the kangaroos or duck-billed quadrupeds of Australia are kept by the surrounding ocean from mixing with the tigers of Sumatra or the tortoises of Madagascar. I employ the writer's own happy illustration:—"In some places these fragments" of the earth's crust "would be piled more or less above each other, and in others quite detached and isolated, like fragments of ice on the bank of a river after a thaw." They would of course be on very different levels, each having, as I have said, a distinct group of animals of its own; and when, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years, the great catastrophe of the Flood came on, it would necessarily find, as it rose along the levels, and submerged platform after platform in succession, a different and yet different set of creatures to kill. To borrow from the description of this ingenious cosmogonist, "those on the lower fragments would be first engulphed, and their races completely extinguished from off the surface, and deposited in the earth; then those on higher and higher upwards, till the whole became submerged. And we have only to suppose that man, with the present survivors, were those that occupied one of the higher table-lands when the Flood commenced (and of course in that case Noah could collect into the ark only out of those of his own country); then the result would be, that man and his present contemporaries would be among the last overwhelmed. This will sufficiently account for the fact of his and their remains not being found deep in the earth....

"The two most interesting geological facts therefore, namely, that distinct organisms are to be found in distinct formations respectively; and secondly, that no remains of man, and few or none of the other races at present surviving, are to be found in any but comparatively recent formations,—these two grand facts of geology, we say, instead of pointing back to vast cycles of ages before the creation, seem to point merely to the peculiar physical circumstances of the fallen planet in the interval between those two eventful stages in its history, the Fall and Flood, and the natural consequences of these circumstances in causing distinct divisions, and some of these of different elevations, among the organic living creatures, during the interval." One other circumstance completes this really original and beautiful hypothesis. The cosmogonist holds that the Flood,—no mere tranquil rising of the waters, as some suppose,—was accompanied by terrible convulsions, which reduced to utter ruin the already shattered earth. The granitic dome fell inwards upon the central furnace; and the fires, bursting outwards under the enormous pressure, found vent at the surface, and made the volcanoes. And this collapsed and diminished world,—scarce half the bulk of the old one,—with no heating furnace under its polar regions, nor aught save the merest tatters of an aurora flitting occasionally over them,—greatly too dense in itself, and surrounded by a greatly too dense atmosphere,—with its huge mountains, vast oceans, wide steppes, and arid deserts, with its snows, its frosts, its drenching rains, its horrible tempests, its terrible thunder storms, and devastating earthquakes,—all alike frightful defects, not in the original plan,—is not only unlike the primeval world, not very good, or, unlike the antediluvian world, tolerably good, but not good at all. "On taking a bird's-eye view of the geographical and hydrographical features or superficies of the globe," says this bold writer, "any unprejudiced person must at once admit, that in either of these departments there is scarce a trace of that beautiful, tasteful, and economical design which we have a right to expect from the admitted qualities of the great Author, and his avowed object in the structure and report of it when newly finished." It is added, however, that "its present object, as the Siberia—the penal settlement—of expatriated rebels, it is in its present state well calculated to fulfil."

It may be worth mentioning, that the writer who sets himself after a fashion so peculiar to assert and justify the ways of Providence against the geologists resides in one of the loveliest districts in Scotland,—a district, however, shaggy with rock, and overshadowed by great mountains, and occasionally visited by earthquake tremors, and both snow and thunder storms, and so, with all its wild beauty to other eyes, merely, I must suppose, one of the rougher districts of the penal Siberia in his. He is, indeed, particularly severe upon mountains; though not, as he tells us, wholly devoid of a lurking prejudice in their favor. But what weak prejudice might palliate or plead for, his better judgment condemns. "See," says this judicious writer, "vast districts of the globe disfigured by tremendous masses of rugged and almost barren mountains.... What, cry some, would you bury as deformities the lofty peak and rugged mountain brow, nature's palaces,—generally the grandest and most sublime objects in natural scenery! We cordially assure the reader we are by no means prejudiced against these grand objects; for if prejudice we have on the subject, it is rather on the other side. It is therefore the force of evidence alone makes us,—reluctantly we admit,—give up these to rank among the derangements and deformities of nature. She, according to her usual taste and economy, would never be at the expense of rearing, and that upon ground that might have otherwise been much better occupied, such unwieldy, useless masses of matter, merely for the sake of gratifying the taste for grandeur and sublimity in a few of her sons, nor, indeed, for any other use we ever heard ascribed to them.... According to our test, a rich and gently undulatory surface, intersected with rivulets and sheets of water, in the places taken up by these elevations, would be far better, as combining in the highest degree the utile cum dulce."[40] To such of my audience as are familiar with Dr. Thomas Burnet's "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1684), that revolution in the cycle of hypothesis to which I have referred, and through which the visionaries of the later ages return to the dreams which had occupied the visionaries of an earlier time, must be sufficiently apparent in this passage. For not only does Burnet speak after the same manner of hills and mountains, but also of an idle, ill-founded prejudice entertained in their favor. We find him thus summing up a general survey of the mountains of the globe:—"Look upon these great ranges: in what confusion do they lie! They have neither form nor beauty, nor shape, nor order, no more than the clouds in the air. Then, how barren, how desolate, how naked are they! How they stand neglected by nature! Neither the rains can soften them, nor the dews from heaven make them fruitful. I give this short survey of the mountains of the earth to help to remove that prejudice we are apt to have, or that conceit that the present earth is regularly formed.... There is nothing in nature," adds this writer, "more shapeless and ill-figured than an old rock or a mountain."

I leave it to my audience to determine how far this depreciatory view,—whether regarded as that of Dr. Burnet or of the modern anti-geologist,—agrees with the estimate of the higher minds, or whether it manifests the proper respect for the adorable Being who, in his infinite wisdom, made our world what it is. Let me next show that some of even the abler and more respectable anti-geologists exhibit no very profound veneration for the letter of Scripture, when, instead of bearing, as they think, against the deductions of their opponents, they find it directly opposed to fancies of their own. It is held by not a few among them, that at the Deluge the sea and land changed places. When the waters receded, it was found, they allege, that the old land had become ocean, and the old ocean had become land; and as there are certain rivers which are described in Scripture as flowing beside Eden, and which, judging by the names given them, still exist, it has become imperative on the assertors of the hypothesis to show that the rivers which now drain tracts of what they hold was then sea, and that fall into seas which they hold were then land, could not by any possibility have formed the boundaries of the old Adamic garden. Let us mark how Mr. Granville Penn,—certainly one of the most extensively informed of his class,—deals with this difficulty.[41] There are, he argues, certain great corruptions of Scripture. What had been at first written as marginal notes by uninspired men, and were in some cases very erroneous and absurd, came in the course of transcription to be transferred, wholly by mistake, from the side of the page into the body of the text; and thus, in at least a few places, the Scriptures were vitiated, and now declare, instead of Divine truth, what is neither sense nor fact. And on this very general, and certainly most perilous ground, he goes on to argue, unsupported by a single ancient manuscript, and solely on what he terms internal evidence, that the verses in Genesis which conflict with his hypothesis must be regarded as mere idle glosses, ignorantly or surreptitiously introduced into the text by the ancient copyists. "In the second chapter of Genesis," we find him saying, "there appears an internal critical evidence of an insertion of the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th verses, similar to that of the 4th verse of the 5th chapter of St. John, and constituting, in a similar manner, a parenthesis intersecting the thread of the narrative, and introduced solely for a similar purpose of illustration. It does not wear the character of the simple narrative in which it appears, but of the surcharge of the gloss or note of a later age, founded upon the fanciful traditions then prevailing with respect to the situation of the ancient Paradise." This certainly is cutting the knot; and, if erected into a precedent by the geologist, would no doubt greatly facilitate the labor of reconciliation. It would, however, be perilous work for him. "A wolf," says Plutarch, "peeping into a hut where a company of shepherds were assembled, saw them regaling themselves with a joint of mutton. 'Ye gods!' he exclaimed, 'what a clamor these men would have raised if they had caught me at such a banquet.'" I need scarcely add, that the hypothesis in whose behalf Scripture is thus divested of its authority, and recklessly cast aside, is entirely a worthless one; and that the various continents of the globe, instead of all dating from one period little more than four thousand years back, are of very various ages,—some of them comparatively modern, though absolutely old in relation to human history; and some of so hoar an antiquity, that the term since man appeared upon earth might be employed as a mere unit to measure it by.

It need not surprise us that a writer who takes such strange liberties with a book which he professes to respect, and which he must have had many opportunities of knowing, should take still greater liberties with a science for which he entertains no respect whatever, and of whose first principles he is palpably ignorant. And yet the wild recklessness of some of his explanations of geological phenomena must somewhat astonish all sufficiently acquainted with the science to know that the place and relations of its various formations have been long since determined, and now as certainly form the regulating data of the practical miner, as the places and relations long since determined by the geographer form the regulating data of the practical navigator or engineer. It is as certain, for instance, that the Oolitic system underlies the Green Sand and the Chalk, with all the various formations of the Tertiary division,—Eocene Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene,—as that York is situated to the south of Edinburgh, or that both these cities lie very considerably to the north of London and Paris. And the anti-geologist who would argue, in the heat of controversy, that the Oolite and the Pleistocene were contemporaneous deposits, would be no more worthy of reply than the anti-geographer who would assert, in order to serve some argumentative purpose, that the North Cape lies in the same latitudinal parallel as South California, or that Terra del Fuego is but a day's sailing from Iceland. And yet such, as I intimated on a former evening, is the line taken up by Mr. Granville Penn, in dealing with the difficulties of the Kirkdale Cave, so remarkable for its accumulations of gnawed bones of the Pleistocene ages,—especially for its bones of hyænas, tigers, bears, wolves, rhinoceroses, and elephants. The cave occurs in the moorlands of Yorkshire, in a limestone rock of that Oolitic division to which the Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag belong, and contains corals and shells that had passed into extinction long even ere the Tertiary period began; while in the cave itself, mixed with bones of the extinct mammals of the geologic age in immediate advance of the present one, there have been found the contemporary remains of animals that still live in our fields and woods, such as the hare, the rabbit, the weasel, and the water rat. And we find Mr. Penn assigning both the Oolitic rock in which the cave is hollowed, and the mammalian remains of the cave itself, equally to the period of the deluge. The limestone existed at that time, it would seem, as a soft calcareous paste, into which the animal remains, floated northwards from intertropical regions on the waters of the Flood, were precipitated in vast quantities, and sank, and then, fermenting under the putrefactive influences, the gas which they formed blow up the yielding lime and mud around them into a long narrow cave, just as a glass-blower blows up a bottle, or as a little yeast blows up into similar but greatly smaller cavities a bit of leaven. And the stalactites and stalagmites which encrust the Kirkdale Cave are, Mr. Penn holds, simply the last runnings of the lime that exuded after the general mass had begun to set. Certainly any one disposed to take such liberties with the Bible on the one hand, and with geologic science on the other, as those taken in the given instances by this most formidable of the anti-geologists, could have but little difficulty in making either Scripture as geological or geology as Scriptural as he had a mind. His chief danger would be that of making the sounder theologians just a little angry, and of escaping, unless quoted for the joke's sake, the notice of the geologists altogether. In truth, the extreme absurdity of our later anti-geologists in virtually contending, in the controversy, that their ignorance of an interesting science, founded on millions of determined facts, ought to be permitted to weigh against the knowledge of the men who have studied it most thoroughly, forms their best defence. It secures them against all save neglect. As, however, some of their number are well meaning men, who would not be ridiculous if they could help it, and only oppose themselves to the geologists because they deem them mischievous and in error, it may be worth while showing them, by an example or two, the ludicrous nature of the positions which in their honest ignorance they permit themselves to occupy, and the real scope and bearing of the arguments which they unwittingly permit themselves to use. I shall adduce two several instances of reasoning, directed by the anti-geologists against their antagonists (as they themselves believed), but which, from their ignorance of the true state of the argument, and of the bearing of the facts with which they dealt, in reality made out for these antagonists as strong a case as they could possibly have made out for themselves. And I am sure that, rather than be found siding with their opponents, the anti-geologists would be content even to acquire a little geology.

I shall select my first instance from the records of the annual controversy which used to rage some ten or fifteen years ago, in sermons, newspapers, and magazines, immediately after every meeting of the British Association. A religious Dublin newspaper,—the "Statesman and Record,"—since extinct, took always an active part in these discussions on the anti-geological side, and boldly affirmed, as in a number now before me, that geology had the devil for its author. A learned correspondent of the paper, who was, however, somewhat more charitable, thought that at least the facts of the science might be exempted from a condemnation so sweeping; nay, that, well interpreted, they might be found decidedly opposed to at least the more mischievous deductions of the geologists; and in illustrating the point, we find him thus arguing, from certain appearances in the valley of the Nile, that the globe which we inhabit cannot possibly be more than six thousand years old.[42] "The valley of the Nile," says this writer, "is known to be covered with a bed of slime which the river has deposited in its periodical inundations, and which rests on a foundation of sand, like that of the adjacent desert. The French savans who accompanied Bonaparte in his Egyptian expedition made several experiments to ascertain the thickness and depth of this superincumbent bed. They dug about two hundred pits, and carefully measured the thickness in the transversal section of the valley, where the deposit had been free from obstacles, and had not been materially increased or lessened by local causes. They found the mean of all these measurements to be six and a half metres, or rather more than twenty feet. M. Gironde endeavored to determine the quantity of slime deposited in a century; and he found that the elevation of soil in that period was rather less than four inches and a half! Dividing the total thickness of the bed by the centenary elevation, he found the quotient 56.50; whence it followed that the inundations had commenced 5650 years before the year 1800, when the experiments were made,—a number which only differed 159 years from the Mosaic date. The difference is not very important, when it is considered that the most trifling error, whether in the measure of the entire superincumbent bed, or in the valuation of the quantity of slime deposited in a century, affects the final results. Notwithstanding this, the coincidence between the sacred historian and the computations of science is remarkable, and furnishes one proof more of the harmony existing between nature and revelation. An honest experimentalist was constrained to arrive at this conclusion at a period when the infidel school of our continental neighbors was in high feather. I am sorry to add, that the result of his own calculation had not that effect on the philosopher himself, or his free-thinking associates, which, for their own sakes, was desirable; but it is no less valuable to us on that account; for we know that an unwilling witness to the truth is worth a score of evidences already prejudiced in its favor."