authority and the luminous arguments of Dr. Prichard, in the work before referred to.

Man and a small number of animals peculiarly serviceable to man, are endowed with a capacity of adaptation to all the differences of climate and other circumstances, not indeed unlimited, but extending through a wide range. This capacity requires, for its complete development, a gradual proceeding in subjection to the agents of change; for which the life of no individual is sufficiently long, nor even the duration of several generations. The process must be carried on through many steps of descent; and, in its course, considerable alterations of structure are slowly produced.

LECTURE III.

ROMANS XI. 36. Of HIM, and through HIM, and to HIM, are all things; to whom be glory for ever.

SOME of the most important positions affirmed in the preceding lecture could not fail to be perceived by my attentive hearers, to be at variance with certain sentiments or interpretations, which are extensively received under the supposition of their being declared, or at least implied, in the Holy Scriptures. It is now my duty to state, in particular detail, what those sentiments and opinions are; and in what manner they stand in contradiction to the facts in the natural history of the earth, to which we have adverted.

My auditors will do me the favour to observe, that I speak of opinions and interpretations; the sentiments which men have taken up, and promulgated as the declarations of the Bible. We have not yet arrived at the part of these lectures in which we shall have to examine whether those interpretations are the genuine sense of the divine oracles. It would not be proper to anticipate that inquiry: yet I cannot but be anxious that my friends should keep constantly in mind the avowal made in the first lecture: namely, my conviction that those interpretations are erroneous. I solicit this favour as a protection to myself from being understood, in this and the following lecture, to cast any doubt upon the truth and authority of the Scriptures. It is not the word of God, but the expositions and deductions of men, from which I am compelled to dissent.

I. It is a prevailing opinion that the dependent universe, in all its extent, was brought into existence by the

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almighty power of its Creator, within the period of the six days laid down in the first portion of the Book of Genesis: chap. i. throughout, and ii. 1-3, where the editorial division should have been made, as that portion is evidently a connected and complete narrative. The same conclusion is also drawn from the language of the fourth commandment: "In six days, the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is." Exod. xx. 11.

To this position the discoveries of geological science are directly opposed. Excepting the higher parts of great mountains, which at widely different epochs have been upheaved, and made to elevate and pierce the stratified masses which once lay over them, there is scarcely a spot on the earth's surface which has not been many times in succession the bottom of a sea, and a portion of dry land. In the majority of cases, it is shown, by physical evidences of the most decisive kind, that each of those successive conditions was of extremely long duration; a duration which it would be presumptuous to put into any estimate of years or centuries; for any alteration of which vestiges occur in the zoological state and the mineral constitution of the earth's present surface, furnishes no analogy, with regard to the nature and continuance of causes, that approaches in greatness of character to those changes whose evidences are discernible in almost any two contiguous strata. It is an inevitable inference, unless we are disposed to abandon the principles of fair reasoning, that each one of such changes in organic life did not take place till after the next preceding condition of the earth had continued through a duration, compared with which six thousand years appear an inconsiderable fraction of time. Among other facts, it is to be observed that the instances referred to often involve an increase of temperature to a great amount. For example, it is proved, by the clearest evidence of vegetable remains, that, in what

are now temperate or extremely cold climates, there prevailed, during the periods of the earlier secondary rocks, a mean of temperature equal to that of the hottest region upon the present surface of the globe, or probably greater. It is also shown, by such evidence as every physiologist and every chemist knows to be satisfactory, that, at the periods referred to, the earth's atmosphere (by being loaded with carbonic acid) must have been so different from that which we possess, that the present kinds of animals breathing by lungs and many kinds which do not so breathe, could not have existed. Now, the evidence, from various points of physical reasoning and from well-known historical facts, is ample, that the same state that now subsists, as to temperature and the constitution of the atmosphere, has belonged to our planet ever since the day that God created man and the animals connected with man. An objection may arise from the recollection that some commentators have supposed, as the mediate cause of the longevity of the antediluvian patriarchs a peculiarly salubrious quality in the atmosphere, which they also suppose to have been destroyed by the deluge, or in consequence of it. But this is an imaginary hypothesis, involving heavier difficulties than what it professes to remove: and, if it were to be accepted, it would add to the weight of reason for the interposition of an immensity of time between the deposition of the carboniferous limestone, for instance, and the present epoch; because the condition of the atmosphere which geological evidence evinces to have belonged to the remote period of which we have been speaking, was the reverse of salubrious, or better fitted to support life than our present common air; it would have been instantly, or in a few moments, fatal to man, or to any lung-breathing animal, such as now exist.

But while the general evidence for an antiquity of the

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earth, so great as to set at nought our attempts at estimation, may be compendiously understood by any one who will take moderate pains in studying the appearances of stratification and the characters of organic remains; it ought to be kept in mind that there is a multitude of facts, of a more minute description, and which present themselves on every hand to the practised geologist, each of which has great importance, but the sum of which amounts to an irresistible body of argument. It would be unreasonable to expect that all, of even liberally educated and well informed persons, should be sufficiently versed in Natural History, Chemistry, and the doctrines of mechanical forces, to be able readily to apprehend and duly to weigh those facts and the deductions from them: but the claim is reasonable that, in such cases, we should satisfy ourselves by giving credit and honour where credit and honour are due. We feel no difficulty in thus relying upon conclusions drawn, in the way of mathematical reasoning, by Newton, Bradley, Laplace, and the Herschels; and, were we to indulge the monstrous supposition that such men were willing to deceive, we know that there are thousands able and ready to detect the minutest error and if such there were. Upexpose any misstatement, on this ground, therefore, I may take a few sentences from a mathematician and man of science, from whom, in the first lecture, I derived an important citation, and who, till his recent resignation, filled the chair of Newton. In his work, "The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise," Mr. Babbage has the following words.

"In truth, the mass of evidence which combines to prove the great antiquity of the earth itself, is so irresistible, and so unshaken by any opposing facts, that none but those who are alike'incapable of observing the facts and appreciating the reasoning, can for a moment conceive the present state of its surface to have been the result of only six thousand years of existence.—Those observers and philosophers who