"If, in studying the infancy of our species, we take an interest in following the almost obliterated traces of numerous nations which have gone out of existence, can we fail to feel an equal interest in piercing the darkness of the earth's infancy, and finding there the marks of revolutions prior to the existence of all nations! We admire the powers by which the mind of man has measured the motions of worlds which nature seemed to have placed for ever out of our view: but genius and science have burst the limits of space; and a small number of observations, unfolded by reasoning, have disclosed the mechanism of the world. Would it not be also a glorious object for man, to learn how he may clear the boundaries of time; and, by means of [well directed] observations, recover the history of our globe, and display the succession of events which preceded the birth of human kind? The astronomers have indeed advanced faster than the students of nature upon earth; and, at the present moment, the theory of the earth somewhat resembles that of some philosophers [of old], who thought the sky to be built of hewn stones, and the moon to be even as big as the Peloponnesus. But Anaxagoras began: Copernicus and Kepler came to clear the way for Newton: and why may not Natural History one day have her Newton ?"*

These aspirations have been realized; so that I may, with propriety, introduce a paragraph from one who is entitled to write in this strain.

"The gradual advance of Geology, during the last twenty years, to the dignity of a science, has arisen from the laborious and extensive collection of facts, and from the enlightened spirit in which the inductions, founded on those facts, have been deduced and discussed. To those who are unacquainted with this science, or indeed to any

Discours, p. 2. I cannot but here borrow the words of a masterly writer: "The geologist was prohibited from looking beyond the Mosaic chronology,-and the peaceful deluge of the Scriptures was the only catastrophe to which he durst ascribe the convulsions and dislocations which had every where shaken the interior of the earth. While our [i.e. English] geologists were thus working in chains, the unfettered genius of CUVIER was ranging over those primeval ages when the primary rocks rose in insulated grandeur from the deep, and when the elements of life had not yet received their DIVINE COMMISSION. From the age of solitude he passed to the busy age of life; when plants first decked the plains, when the majestic pine threw its picturesque shadows over the earth, and the tragic sounds of carnivorous life rung among her forests. But these plains were again to be desolated, and these sounds again to be hushed. The glories of organic life disappeared, and new forms of animal and vegetable being welcomed the dawn of a better cycle. Thus did the great magician of the charnel-house survey from his pyramid of bones, the successive ages of life and death; thus did he conjure up the spoils of preexisting worlds, the noblest offering which reason ever laid upon the altar of its SOVEREIGN." Edinburgh Review, vol. lxv. p. 12.

person not deeply versed in the history of this and kindred subjects, it is impossible to convey a just impression of the nature of that evidence by which a multitude of its conclusions are supported: evidence in many cases so irresistible, that the records of the past ages, to which it refers, are traced in language more imperishable than that of the historian of any human transactions; the relics of those beings, entombed in the strata which myriads of centuries have heaped upon their graves, giving a present evidence of their past existence with which no human testimony can compete."

One of the ornaments of Geology, in our own country, has indeed gone through a course of sentiment not much unlike that which I have been supposing in relation to Cuvier. Dr. Buckland, in his Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, published in 1823, quoted a part of the passage which I read a few minutes ago; and gave the sanction of his so deservedly high authority to the idea that the present surface of the earth is the effect of the diluvial waters. While he was enriching his own pages with the pleasing citation, he was furnishing his illustrious friend at Paris with a seeming corroboration of the opinion. Speaking of the mud, gravel, and bones of the Kirkdale Caves, Baron Cuvier proceeds;

"Most carefully described by Prof. Buckland, under the name of diluvium, and exceedingly different from those other beds of similarly rolled materials, which are constantly deposited by torrents and rivers, and contain only bones of the animals existing in the country, and to which Mr. Buckland gives the name of alluvium; they now form, in the eyes of all geologists, the fullest proof to the senses of that immense inundation which came the last in the catastrophes of our globe." +

This testimony was just.. Dr. Buckland had indeed put forth his zeal, his characteristic patience, and his never wearied exertions, in exploring the drift, or, as it was usually called, dilurium, of the British Isles: and after careful inductions from his own observations, he proceeded with the following passage, in reference to that mighty action of water to which such effects were attributed.

"An agent thus gigantic appears to have operated universally on the surface of our planet at the period of the deluge; the spaces then

* Ninth Bridgewater Treatise; p. 47.

† Discours, p. 141.

laid bare by the sweeping away of the solid materials that had before filled them, are called Valleys of Denudation; and the effects we see produced by water in the minor cases I have just mentioned, by presenting us an example, within tangible limits, prepare us to comprehend the mighty and stupendous magnitude of those forces by which whole strata were swept away, and valleys laid open, and gorges excavated in the more solid portions of the substance of the earth, bearing the same proportion to the overwhelming ocean by which they were produced, that modern ravines on the sides of mountains bear to the torrents which, since the retreat of the deluge, have created and continue to enlarge them."*

Reliq. Diluv. p. 237.

LECTURE V.

2 PETER ii. 5. God spared not the old world,―bringing the flood upon the world of the ungodly.

In this sentence of the holy apostle, it is manifestly declared, that the design of the deluge was to inflict a deserved punishment upon that generation of men, whose awful impiety had defied the power of the Most High, and scorned his mercy. This defining of the object warrants the conclusion, that whatever amount and extent of the diluvial waters would suffice to execute the sentence of excision, would also be adequate to fulfil the moral purpose of the Righteous Judge in ordaining this infliction. If the universality of the flood extended to the human race, "the world of the ungodly," it is all that was requisite to satisfy the purpose of the visitation.

In the last lecture, we had set before us some account of the mistaken views which had been extensively entertained concerning the effects of the deluge, as supposed to have left their permanent impressions upon the surface of our globe: and we listened to the opinions of some of the most illustrious naturalists and geologists in favour of that hypothesis, under different modifications.

But the lapse of not more than ten years has brought a vast collection of observations to bear upon this interesting subject: and I conceive it may, with the strictest truth, be said that the annals of science, or of literature, or of theology, do not present a nobler instance of fairness and mental integrity, than was shewn by the most perfect geologists that our country, or any other, can boast, in yielding up a favourite and long cherished opinion, to which they had committed themselves in the most public manner, and for which they had been hailed with flattering applause; knowing also, by a very sure anticipation,

that the concession to the power of evidence, the avowal of honest conviction, would expose them to the censures of some, who "understand neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm," though they speak and write with a confidence in the direct proportion of their incompetency to say or affirm upon good grounds.

The observations which, in their legitimate deductions, have produced this remarkable result, have been made by many persons, and those the best qualified, from their high attainments in all science, and the skill for making observations which long practice alone can give: they have been made in many countries, near and far distant; and they have been made with a circumspection, an exactitude, and an anxious watchfulness against the causes of mistake, which ought to command our admiration and gratitude.

Those laborious researches were chiefly directed to the drift of which we have been speaking, and to which was commonly assigned the name of diluvium. This is found to spread widely over the surface in many countries, either visibly covering the ground, or barely concealed by the turf and cultivable soil. During the more early period of geological progress, this diversified mass was, implicitly, and rather hastily, though the error was natural, regarded as of one formation; and thence it was an easy step of advance, in drawing the conclusion that a universal flood was the active and immediate cause of the whole, that this flood was among the most recent events affecting the exterior crust of the earth, and that it must have been identical with the great deluge of universal tradition and of sacred history. But the need was felt of closer examination, minutely distinguishing, and carefully classifying. The constitution, mineralogical, or lithological (for we cannot altogether avoid using the technical terms), of the small grains of sand, the pebbles, the bowlders, and the masses of all sizes, which compose the so-called diluvium, was scrutinized, and compared with the character of rocks at every point on the lines of distance, till the parent rocks were demonstrated from which the fragments had been broken or rubbed off. The mineralogical constitution thus traced up to a commencing point, gave a sure indication of the extent of each kind of drift; and a measure of the varying