When we descend from the land to the sea we find equally extensive accumulations, spread over the bottom, or raised along the tide-level in the form of bars, shoals, and banks. The whole eastern coast of the United States[15] is bordered throughout by a line of sand-banks and islands, of various forms and outline, but very uniform in their mineral ingredients, being composed for the most part of a fine, white, and quartzose sand. On the coasts of the southern states, the Carolinas and Virginia, they form a chain of low islands, separated from the coast by a series of lagoons; while higher up, on the southern coasts of New England, they occur as submarine ridges, parallel to the coast, and separated from each other by wide channels. To the north, these arenaceous deposits are still more extensive, forming vast submarine plateaux, such as the St. George and Newfoundland banks. And at the bottom of all the bays and creeks of that much indented land, prodigious siltings are going forward, not under the form of narrow ridges, but as broad connected strata or flats; consisting seaward of very fine sand, and more inward of a coarse gravel, and in not a few instances of calcareous mud, where the deposit takes place in the vicinity of coral reefs. The same processes are in operation around every island and by the shores of every continent where tidal action favors the deposition of the materials—the result as now ascertained, not so much of rivers, as of oceanic currents. The depth of these sands it is impossible to determine; but thousands of feet may not reach their soundings. And as to organic remains, they are most favorably situated and composed for attracting and sustaining every kind of marine creature: it is upon the banks that border the coast of North America that the most extensive fisheries are carried on, because these are the abodes of those myriads of invertebral animals—the molluscs, annelides, and zoophytes, types of the older formations—which serve for the food of fishes, the ctenoids and cycloids of maritime enterprise. And thus, co-extensive with the littoral territories of the ocean, we have all the elements and ingredients of a formation, completing within the human epoch, that may almost rival the Old Red Sandstone itself.
Nor does the analogy terminate in the production, whether of one or many beds, of sand and gravel deposits. Simultaneously with these, there will be siltings and accumulations of various kinds of materials arranging themselves, at different depths, over the bottom of the ocean. The beds, too, will have their edges slid over each other, and where maintaining a degree of parallelism, the inclination of the more remote members of the suite will correspond with the increasing depth of the sea bottom. Then the imbedded remains will be as various as the different kinds, genera, and species of animals that frequent the different localities; nor will eruptive matter be always wanting to give diversity to the scene, indurating, dislocating, and disarranging the relative position of the deposits: Until we have formed, within our present seas, the whole complement of a geological formation—the calcareous, muddy, sandy, gravelly suites, cotemporaneous in origin and growth, with all their diversity of fossils, living and imbedded at the same period—some beds consisting entirely of microscopic or other marine bodies—some composed of vegetable and other mixed materials—some where the land and waters have mingled their spoils together—and all to be united and agglutinated into one great composite system by the dykes and eruptions of submarine volcanoes.
These processes are all now in active operation; and, without straining the argument, the clear undeniable inference is, that, as the amount of materials accumulated and arranged in the modern, so will be the ratio of increase in the more ancient periods of the earth’s history and revolutions. And hence thousands, not millions of years, would, upon such inductions, be the scale of reckoning as to time.
But to state the argument in this form is vastly to underrate the forces of nature in the primeval times. There are, on the contrary, the strongest reasons for believing that the two classes of phenomena can bear no proportion to each other, either as to the manner of or the periods occupied in their formation. The bulk of dry land, compared with water, was then, as all geological appearances testify, perhaps only a twentieth instead of a third part, as now, of the supermarine area of the globe. How infinitely greater, therefore, would be the action of the waters over all the materials subject to their disintegrating power, whether upon the islands and continents already raised above their waves, or upon the immense submarine tracks of rock just lifting up their peaks and waiting to be elevated into air? Nor in alluding to volcanic products can we fail to perceive how immensely inferior are the modern to those of the palæozoic ages, when all the great mountain-ranges were bursting into position; the American continent, not as now with a few isolated eruptive centers, but rending all over, as the mighty Andes and Cordilleras were rising above the deep and assuming outline; and in every quarter of the globe the plutonic, erosive, and denuding agencies were upon a scale of corresponding magnitude. Leibnitz, in his “Protogæa,” has long ago anticipated these views, where, in the masterly sketch of his leading geological canons, he distinctly refers to the more intensive energy with which physical causes must have acted in primordial times; and considers that these disruptions of the earth’s crust, from the disturbances communicated to the incumbent waters, must have been attended with diluvial action on the largest scale. The maximæ secutæ inundationes, thereby occasioned, had produced their natural effects, when the period of repose succeeded—the quiescentibus causis, atque aequilibratis, consistentior emergeret rerum status, as he so beautifully describes one out of many recurring stages of paroxysm and repose during the Course of Creation.
Whatever views may be adopted on this momentous question, I shall conclude by observing that it is not necessary, in support of the one here advocated, to assume that the secondary causes which have produced the geological phenomena referred to, were different in kind from those in operation at the present day. But it is asserted that such physical causes must have been immensely increased, in the degree and intensity of their action, by the very different condition of the planet, and the circumstances under which, in consequence, they began to operate. As to the millionade doctrine, if I may so term it, there are in every view the greatest difficulties in the way of its adoption,—errors of calculation somewhere to be corrected, inconsistencies to be reconciled, conditions of organic life gratuitously assumed and to be rectified. It matters not, indeed, whether we take the organic or the inorganic structures of the several periods as the gauge of their probable duration—the living tribes that existed throughout such periods, and whose relative ages we can approximate to—or the dead rock in which the remains are interred, and in the accumulation and arrangement of which so many extraordinary agencies have been demonstratively concerned. The laws of nature, in the one case, are nearly uniform; species as well as individuals have their limited terms of existence; and experience establishes the fact, that the living tribes of the modern epoch have, in several instances, become extinct within a comparatively short period of time. The operations of nature, in the other case, are subject to vast diversity, great and sudden changes, and apparently limited by no ascertained maximum of development. And thus combined, so far as our present state of knowledge extends, the inference is warrantable, that in the geological register the error may be one—of millions of years’ reckoning!
CHAPTER VI.
THE MOSAIC RECORD—ACCOUNT OF CREATION.
The conclusion attempted to be established by the preceding mode of reasoning, is not of the kind, nor will it be so satisfactory as, many desiderate. The sacred chronology, according to the common interpretation, remains as it was; and no harmony can thus be established betwixt it and the deductions of geology. Bring down the epochs to thousands instead of millions of years, and still the days of Scripture are not explained. The historical and the scientific accounts of the course of creation are just where they were, the one based on the word of its Author, the other resting on rash or doubtful interpretations of the phenomena of nature. Leave us, says the geologist, to grope our own way: mystical as our records are, we disturb no established truth, and imagination delights to lose itself in the far-distant past. Let not, says the divine, the speculations of a new science—a science of yesterday—be mixed up with more important matters of religion: we are within the sacred precincts of revelation, and our oracles give forth no dubious meanings—no isoteric doctrines for the initiated only.
The marvels of geology certainly are, in every view that can be taken of them, deeply interesting to the mind. The volume of creation, read in the light of its discoveries, is traced back through pages which have been long hid from day; and these now make known to us a story of life and death, of activities and enjoyments, of catastrophes and revolutions, which surpass in wonder the inventions of the mere romance writer, or all that regulated genius can pour “from pictured urn” of her most fascinating lore. But be the time occupied in the elaboration of these records what it may, the records themselves have an actual being, and a language of intelligence indelibly impressed upon them. They are genuine, authentic documents of their author. They may be misinterpreted. Inferences may be deduced from them for which there is no warrant; constructions put upon passages which they will not legitimately bear; or the true key of the volume, in its great leading truths, may not as yet have been found. Still the work is of God, wholly and entirely the writing of his own hand.
Revelation is also His work; and, claiming to be from the same authority as the other, rests its pretensions to be received as an authentic document upon the ground of creation. It gives details, and enters into explanations of the nature and origin of creation; and it declares that the same Divine Being who made the heavens and the earth, has also recorded their history and revealed his will to man. It is by no mere casualty, therefore, or as a matter of indifference, that the Bible commences its narrative by an account of creation. That account is there as the foundation of one of its own claims to belief, testifying to its credibility that it is of God; that He placed it there, not as a skillful writer would do his preface, but because of the fact, that the invisible things of his nature are to be seen and understood by the things which are made.—What is thus declared upon the subject of creation, is likewise liable to misinterpretation. It may not be read aright. But of the account itself there can be no question,—that it is given as a real, as it ever must be regarded a true one, of the Divine operations.