and resting lake, nor those of the descending river, the exact similars of the preceding. The properties of water, as a definite compound of oxygen and hydrogen, are the same in every particle of its substance; but all its other laws and operations arise from the circumstances in which it is placed, and the other agencies with which it is for the time associated. Thus water in a mist-in a marsh-in the form of ice, or in a boiling state, has distinct laws, and acts to produce very different effects in each of these conditions; but these laws accrue to it after it has come into the situation. Be not then deceived by words which really have no meaning. No laws of nature have constructed any part of the essential frame of our globe; for they arise from its construction, and could not cause that which has caused them to be what they are. They are the offspring of creation in every department, and not its parent. They are. the inventions, the planned agents and instruments of its Author; the appointed derivatives from his system of things; the chosen subordinate operations which he willed and ordained to arise from it, and therefore has caused to arise from the compositions, and dispositions, and regulated state of the constructed fabric. They were selected and appointed to continue and carry on the chosen and framed scheme and course of things; to actuate or accompany the movements of each specific part; to produce the effects that were meant to follow, and to be the usual and consistent order of nature on the earth. They act to uphold and preserve this, and to do from time to time what in the great plan of its subsistence, and for the time of its duration, was to be consecutively effected. The subsistent agencies, those which continue, carry on, preserve, and perpetuate what exist, cannot be those which created or which destroy. What formed, has formed; and, having formed, must have ceased to form; or else it has not formed. The forming process having ended in the formation, the forming agencies and instrumentalities closed their operation with it, and cannot now be acting. It cannot be the forming agencies that we now see operating in nature; for, if they were still in action, we should find little worlds, like little children, issuing from our parent world, or germinating upon it like the buds from a tree, or their young from the polypus. Nothing seems more clear and certain to our intellects or apprehension than this reasoning and this conclusion. When the ship is sailing in her course, the building agencies are not operating upon her. These constructed her in the dockyard; but having finished their work, their framing agency ceased. She was launched into the waves, and is now moving and subsisting under other agencies, quite distinct from those by which she was put together. Winds, and sails, and ropes, and masts, and yards; the rudder, the waves, the seamen and their officers, are now the agencies that are affecting her; as the shipwright and naval architect were those agents by whom she was built. So, as the forming agencies of a world operated to form it, they ceased their work as soon as the formation was completed; and thus we see that it is impossible that any natural agencies now in operation on our earth can be those which framed it. Let us then not think of accounting for the origin of nature by any physical laws or agencies which are now acting upon it or within it. What she now wants and is using, must be conserving and continuous, not framing agencies. She is formed as she was meant to be, many centuries ago; and the upholding, cohering, maintaining, and continuing agencies, such as will carry on her created system and subsisting course of things, are those which must now be operating within and upon her. I have called your attention to these important principles of our great argument, because so many men of real talent and science persist, in their geological reasonings, to write and conjecture, as if all our rocky formations and earthy strata were solely the effects of the natural laws and properties of things. Hence one gentleman says, "there is no reason to suppose that the antediluvian sea formed its deposites more rapidly than the seas do at present, and therefore hundreds, perhaps thousands of ages, were occupied by this deposition." Thus it is also urged, that "sixteen centuries are far too short a period for the deposition of beds of the enormous thickness which we find the regular strata to possess." In like manner it is declared, "the secondary and tertiary formation bear traces of having occupied hundreds, perhaps thousands of ages in their deposition."* In all ideas of this * These remarks are taken from MS. observations of a living author. They are in more detail in several published writings. sort, the authors look only at the material substances and their properties; and omit entirely the supposition of a devising forming, commanding, and operating mind; and yet not one single natural law, agency, substance, or formation exists, which such a pre-existing mind has not deliberately and intentionally made; and which, therefore, has not at all times essentially operated to do within the periods that he thought fit, every successive action, and effect, and formation, which his intelligence meant to take place. The Creator never left it to material things to create for him, or to move sluggishly and casually into the masses of the globe. He formed the earth as he designed to form it and his omnipotence has, in all its structure, acted to execute the plans of his omniscient, and all-providing, and all-adjusting sagacity. Nor must we deviate into the error of supposing, that instead of a planned and deliberate creation, all living things have originated of themselves, from such primeval molecules as we find in the smallest animalcula which the microscope detects in various fluids; and have been nothing else but a continual series of transformations from these into larger and larger, and more and more complicated in their organizations, until at last, after undergoing these changes for myriads of ages, they have come to be the various orders, genera, and species of animals which now form the brute inhabitants of our globe.* The advocates of this imagination feel that no moderate sequence of time would accomplish such wonderful mutations as these, and therefore stretch their chronology to an almost endless period, in order to allow a duration long enough for the production of such an effect as if any succession of years could effect that which never can be achieved but by the omnipotence which they disclaim or supersede. The answer to such dreams is given : *The reveries of De Maillet, published a century ago, and of Buffon in 1778, have been, in our days, enlarged upon by La Marck, and are still maintained by his followers, M. F. Cuvier thus briefly states them as now upheld by some. "The theory of Buffon supposed living organic molecules, which becoming developed, each according to conditions peculiar to it, after the lapse of thousands upon thousands of years, are themselves modified into as many myriads of times, and have, at last, been brought into that state in which they were able to produce this world of living animals that now covers the surface of our globe, from the creatures that can be only rendered visible by the aid of the microscope."-F. Cuvier's Prelim Disc. to Baron Cuvier's Fossil Bones, 4 ed. Lond. v. i. p. 7. conclusively by Baron Cuvier's brother; that there never has been an instance of such a change, and therefore it is a lawless conjecture, formed in wilful contradiction to all recorded knowledge, and to all existing experience.* It is on the fossil remains, and the succession of plants, and of the small marine animals, and of interposed strata, and on apparent successions of fresh water and seawater overfloodings in some particular parts, as in the chalk or calcareous basins or formations of France and England, that many have raised up an anti-Mosaic chronology. The limits' and remaining topics of this work will not allow me to go into that detail of facts and reasonings which satisfies me, that erroneous conclusions have been formed on these points from insufficient and sometimes misapprehended premises. But I am convinced, after a deliberate judgment, that in opposing the authentic facts of revelation, they are consigning themselves to future censure and neglect. It was an old Roman remark, that what is true, time confirms, and obliterates what is otherwise. It has already brought to light many phenomena which have thrown down several former fallacies; it will yet disclose others to us, which will subvert all the newer mistakes that are now so strongly maintained. The fossil remains recently discovered in the Burdie House limestone, near Edinburgh, alluded to in the preceding Letter, are a proof that some of our present geological theories must be greatly modified, as a larger examination of nature reveals more fully our Creator's subterraneous operations to us.‡ * "The truth really is this: There is no fact whatever, of this description, among the records of science. For no person in the world. has ever seen any species transform its state of existence, to any extent or in any shape, in order to be converted, either totally or even partially, into another species "-Prel. Dis. p. 8. "Neither has there been a single case known, throughout the world, in which one of our dogs has been found turned into a wolf, or a jackal, or a fox. There is no example in the records of natural history of a horse having assumed the character of an ass, or an ass taking on that of a zebra. Never did we find a single instance in which any one variety of our goats was metamorphosed into sheep, or vice versa.”—Ib. p. 10. See page 265, note *. Dr. Roget, at the close of his late valuable work, justly says, "The pursuit of remote and often fanciful analogies has, by many of the continental physiologists, been carried to an unwarrantable and extravagant length for the scope which is given to the imagination in these seductive speculations, tends rather to obstruct than to advance the progress LETTER XX. New Formation or Adjustment of the Surface, after the Deluge, so as to produce the Soils fit for Human Residence and Cultivation-And for the present system of Vegetable and Animal Nature. MY DEAR SYDNEY, THAT the present surface of the earth on which we are living was not, in all its regions, that primeval surface on which the first plants vegetated, the organic remains in several of the subterraneous rocks satisfactorily evince. The exterior masses of our globe, to the lowest depth that we have been able to explore, appear to consist of a succession of rocks, which have been traced and named, and of which you had a summary notice in the seventh and eighteenth of my former Letters, with a brief intimation of the vegetable and animal fossils which had been found among them. would be too great a digression from the main and chosen subject of the present correspondence to enter into a review of the geological construction of our earth, although it is an important compartment of its sacred history. But my other topics, and the limits which I have fixed for these pages, compel me to abstain from it, and only to desire you to bear It of real knowledge. By confining our inquiries to more legitimate objects, we shall avoid the delusion into which one of the disciples of this transcendental school appears to have fallen, when he announces with exultation, that the simple laws he has discovered have now explained the universe: nor shall we be disposed to lend a more patient ear to the more presumptuous reveries of another system-builder, who, by assuming that there exists in organized matter an inherent tendency to perfectibility, fancies that he can supersede the operations of divine agency." Dr. Roget closes his gratifying task with this admirable paragraph. "Happily there has been vouchsafed to us from a higher source, a pure and heavenly light to guide our faltering steps, and animate our fainting spirit, in this dark and dreary search, revealing those truths which it imports us most of all to know; giving to morality higher sanctions; elevating our hopes and affections to nobler objects than belong to earth, and inspiring more exalted themes of thanksgiving and of praise."Roget, An. & Veg. Phy. vol. ii. p. 639-41. |