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EVOLUTION 
 
 THE STONE BOOK, 
 
 AND THE 
 
 MOSAIC RECORD OF CREATION. 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS COOPER, 
 
 Lecturer on Christianity: 
 
 Author of * The Purgatory of Suicides, ‘ The Paradise of Martyrs^ 
 ‘ The Bridge of History over the Gulf of Tivte^ etc.^ etc. 
 
 CINCINNATI : 
 
 CRANSTON AND CURTS. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 HUNT AND EATON. 
 
 1893- 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 HIS fifth Handbook of my ‘Evidence Series* 
 
 contains the substance of Three Lectures 
 which have been spoken in nearly every part of 
 England. It is published — like the four volumes 
 which preceded it — ^t the urgent request of my 
 hearers, and, in brief, for the reasons, already 
 alleged, which induced me to put those volumes 
 into print. 
 
 THOMAS COOPER. 
 
 672404 
 
EVOLUTION. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2017 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates 
 
 https://archive.org/details/evolutionstoneboOOcoop 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 INTRODUCTION ........ I 
 
 I. 
 
 DE MAILLET AND HIS THEORY — LINNAEUS AND HIS 
 ‘ SYSTEMA NATUR-E ’ — LAMARCK AND ST. HILAIRE 
 — CUVIER AND PALEONTOLOGY .... 5 
 
 II. 
 
 * VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION,’ 
 
 AND THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT . . lO 
 
 III. 
 
 MR. DARWIN, AND ‘THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY 
 
 NATURAL SELECTION ’ I3 
 
 IV. 
 
 MR. HERBERT SPENCER AND ‘EVOLUTION’ — THE SYN- 
 THETIC PHILOSOPHY — MR. DARWIN’s REJECTION 
 OF ‘FINAL CAUSES ’ — THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS 18 
 
 V. 
 
 TRUTH OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY CHALLENGED ; 
 
 vii 
 
 AND ITS ABSURDITIES EXHIBITED 
 
 25 
 
Vlll 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 V^I. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 MR. DARWINS THEORY OF ‘SEXUAL SELECTION* — 
 
 ITS IRREVERENCE TOWARDS THE GREAT MAKER 
 — ^VERY DIFFERENT THINKINGS OF OTHER IN- 
 TELLECTUAL MEN 34 
 
 VII. 
 
 * THE REIGN OF LAW * — A WORD ABOUT ‘ USELESS 
 ORGANS* — MR. DARWIN’S FORGETFULNESS OF 
 THE FORESIGHT EVIDENT IN GOD*S CREATION 38 
 
 VIII. 
 
 HAECKEL AND THE PLASTIDULIC SOUL — PESSIMISM 
 IN GERMANY — NECESSITARIAN TEACHING OF 
 PROFESSOR TYNDALL, AND ITS RUINOUS TEN- 
 DENCY • 
 
EVOLUT ION. 
 
 I F some of our honoured forefathers could 
 awake from the dead, and tread again the soil 
 of this dear old England that they loved so much, 
 they would, doubtless, feel great amazement, 
 mingled with exultant pride, when they beheld our 
 commercial, industrial, and scientific progress. If 
 the great men of the age of Elizabeth could be 
 joined with the great men of our Commonwealth 
 period, and look upon their native land as it exists 
 now, with its advancing civilisation, — one cannot 
 help thinking that the illustrious band of our great 
 forefathers, which we have named, would raise 
 hand and heart towards heaven, and say, with one 
 voice, “ Thank God, for what He has done for Old 
 England ! and long may the dear old land prosper 
 and flourish I ” 
 
 I 
 
2 
 
 THOUGHTS OF OUR FOREFATHERS. 
 
 But Others might be named of our revered and 
 honoured forefathers who, if they could live again, 
 would experience very different emotions, on learn- 
 ing the nature of some great changes that mark 
 our day. If the martyrs who were burned, in the 
 reign of Mary, for their attachment to Protestant 
 truth, could rise, and witness the spread of Ritualism 
 and Popery among us, we are sure that it would 
 distress them greatly. And, if the founders of the 
 Royal Society — Sir Christopher Wren, and the 
 Hon. Robert Boyle, and John Ray, the author of 
 that good old book The Wisdom of God in the 
 Creation,” and their associates, could live again, 
 and be joined by our illustrious Newton — such 
 truly reverential men could not fail to express their 
 deep mortification and sorrow, at the perverse 
 attempt of so many scientific men of our time, to 
 revive the Atheistic philosophy of the worst schools 
 of ancient Greece. 
 
 The men who are considered to be the leaders 
 in Science of the present day make it no secret 
 that they throw the Design Argument, or Doctrine 
 of Final Causes, to the winds. They tell us, 
 without concealment, that they have ‘done with 
 
SCEPTICISM OF OUR OWN DAY. 
 
 teleology ’ — for they can discern no proof of design, 
 or contrivance, or purpose, either in the living or 
 inorganic world. They maintain that what we 
 deem to be evidences of design and contrivance 
 and purpose in Nature — and, therefor#; proofs of 
 the existence of the Creator — are, simply, the out- 
 come and result of the action of the unconscious 
 and eternal forces of matter. It is, they affirm, by 
 the unconscious action of these forces, that the 
 molecules and atoms of matter came to take their 
 present forms. It may be very agreeable employ- 
 ment for our emotional nature, Professor Tyndall 
 thinks, to be religious ; but science, he assures us, 
 teaches him no religion, and reveals to him no 
 personal God. A personal God is unthinkable, 
 says Herbert Spencer. And other scientific men 
 do not conceal from us that they have similar 
 convictions. 
 
 All this, be it remembered, is new^ in our country. 
 In the past time, when Hobbes and HuAie, and 
 some lesser men, intellectually, were busy in sowing 
 the seeds of Unbelief, they were not countenanced, 
 but opposed, by contemporary Englishmen who 
 were foremost in scientific enquiry and discovery. 
 
4 
 
 SCEPTICISM OF OUR OWN DAY. 
 
 Noi did the sceptical plague which afflicted France 
 in her great revolutionary struggle extend its con- 
 tagion to the scientific mind of this land. Well- 
 nigh half of this our Nineteenth Century was past 
 before the English public became aware, by the ten- 
 tative issue of what were deemed, at first, ‘ curious 
 speculations in Natural History,’ that some of our 
 students and professors of Science were bent on 
 the promulgation of views which must tend to the 
 subversion of both Natural and Revealed Religion. 
 
 Since the history of these ^ curious speculations ’ 
 is the history of the Theory of Evolution, it will, 
 now, be my duty to set it before you in as concise 
 and lucid a manner as possible. A few words, 
 however, must first be said on what already passed 
 in France. 
 
L 
 
 DE MAILLET AND HIS THEORY — LINN^US AND HIS 
 ‘SYSTEMA naturae’ — LAMARCK AND ST. HILAIRE 
 — CUVIER AND PALEONTOLOGY. 
 
 I N the year 1748, a French writer, named De 
 Maillet, tried to persuade his fellow-country- 
 men that plants and animals were not special 
 creations of God, but only spontaneously modified 
 forms of ‘ Nature.’ The influence of the beautiful 
 and reverential spirit of Linnaeus preserved men of 
 science from adopting De Maillet’s theory; and 
 the French public, of that period, only treated it 
 with ridicule. 
 
 In the early part of this, our nineteenth century, 
 three remarkable Frenchmen may be said to have 
 created a new era in Natural History : Lamarck, 
 who took up the theory maintained by De Maillet, 
 and maintained the doctrine of ^ Transmutation of 
 Species ’ — Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who leaned to the 
 notions of Lamarck — and Cuvier, that greatest of 
 all zoologists, who, like Linnaeus, maintained the 
 truth of the Design Argument, and that all de- 
 criptions of living beings are the special creation 
 
6 
 
 LAMARCK'S BOLD THEORY OF THE 
 
 of God. Lamarck had made the lowest animal 
 forms his special study — such as the sponges, the 
 jelly-fishes, the corallines and other zoophytes, 
 and the shell fish; and the likeness among them 
 seemed, to him, to show that one animal form had 
 passed into another, and that higher animal forms 
 had been ‘ transmuted ’ out of lower forms. His 
 friend, Geofiroy St. Hilaire, inclined to take the 
 same view, from his close observance of what is 
 called ‘ Homology,’ or the close resemblance of 
 all the vertebrate animals, in the general plan of 
 their construction — a resemblance, by the way, 
 which our own countryman, the illustrious John 
 Hunter, was wont strongly to insist upon. 
 
 Lamarck contended that the exertion of their 
 desires was a great cause of the difference in the 
 forms of some animals. He instanced the Swan 
 and the Giraffe, as proofs of his doctrine of 
 “ Transmutation of Species.” The progenitors of 
 these creatures, he contended, had as short necks 
 as other creatures ; but, by the exertion of the 
 bird to get food at the bottom of a stream, and 
 of the beast to gather leaves from high trees in the 
 barren seasons of a torrid clime — the twain had 
 
TRANSMUTATION OF SPECIES. 
 
 7 
 
 lengthened their own necks, in the process, it 
 might be, of many hundreds of thousands of years. 
 So also, he thought, the grallatores, or wading- 
 birds, — such as the Crane and the Heron, — have 
 lengthened their own legs, by persistency in going 
 deep into the water, for their prey ; and the swim- 
 ming-birds have originated th^ webs between their 
 toes, by persistent attempts at swimming — also, in 
 the process of unreckonable years. 
 
 Cuvier threw all his strength into the opposite 
 views. He had, early, been a diligent student 
 of human anatomy, and had extended his studies 
 to the anatomy of the lower animals. He thus 
 reached a firm conviction, which was never shaken, 
 that there was supremely intelligent picrpose in all 
 the creation. The fact that every animal was 
 fitted to get its own living, and to take care of 
 itself and its Species ; — that one part of an animal 
 was so evidently adapted to the other parts, that 
 seeing a part of an animal — a bone, or a tooth, — 
 he could judge of what species or family the animal 
 was — seemed conclusive evidence to Cuvier that 
 God had separately and specially created each 
 animal race, upon the earth 
 
8 
 
 GENIUS AND SKILL OF CUVIER. 
 
 He remodelled the system of Linnaeus, with a 
 bold but reverent hand ; and, in doing this, he 
 assigned the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, 
 tapir, swine, horse, zebra, ass, and a few othei 
 animals, into a separate order: the ‘Pachyder- 
 mata,’ or thick-skinned animals. Pondering on 
 the fact that they ^were so few in number, he 
 thought there must have been more of them at one 
 period ; and then, guided by his profound skill 
 in Osteology, or the science of the bones, he dis- 
 cerned that there were spaces — so to speak — 
 between several of the species composing this order 
 of the Pachydermata, for other species of such and 
 such a form. Shall we call it prophecy, when he 
 said such animals might be found ? No : it was 
 true scie7ice derived from an intelligent and devoted 
 study of the Creator’s plans — for the petrifactions 
 of the very creatures he had described, from wise 
 and skilful foresight, were, soon after, found, in the 
 gypsum quarries of Montmartre, outside Paris; 
 and he had the gratifying task of arranging them, 
 for the Museum, with his own hands. 
 
 Cuvier, by thus founding the sub-science of 
 Palaeontology (or discourse of ancient animals) 
 
CUVIER FOUNDS PALEONTOLOGY. 
 
 9 
 
 may be considered as the real founder of Geology; 
 for that great science, by his discoveries, grew" into 
 real importance in the eyes of men of science. 
 Cuvier’s name not only became the great name in 
 zoology but all the elder geologists of our own 
 country, — Buckland, Sedgwick, and the rest — 
 ranged themselves under his banner, as believers 
 in ‘ Final Causes,’ or the doctrine of separate and 
 special creations. It was otherwise in Germany. 
 Goethe had already given hints that he suspected 
 a derivation of man from the animals ; and Oken 
 and the Physiophilosophers had broached views 
 utterly unlike those of Linnaeus and Cuvier. But 
 it was not known, until the year 1844, that the 
 theory of Lamarck had any real disciples in 
 England. 
 
 2 
 
10 
 
 CURIOSITY ABOUT ‘VESTIGES.’ 
 
 II. 
 
 # 
 
 * VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION * 
 AND THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 I N that year, a book of a popular character 
 was published, which may be said to have 
 startled all sorts of people, scientific and unscien- 
 tific. It was entitled ‘ Vestiges of the Natural 
 History of Creation.^ I went from Stafford prison 
 to live in London, and commence authorship, in 
 the year after that in which this book was published ; 
 and shall not soon forget the excitement there was 
 among literary people, about this book. ‘ Have 
 you read the Vestiges ? ’ — ‘ What do you think of 
 the Vestiges ? ’ — was asked on every side. Who 
 wrote the book — was a profound secret; and for 
 aught I know, it is a secret yet. Robert Chambers 
 of Edinburgh was loudly charged with its author- 
 ship; but denied it. Dr. Neil Arnott, and other 
 
MR. CROSSE, AND THE ‘ACARUS.* II 
 
 scientific men, — and even Lord Byron’s daughter, 
 Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, — were also charged 
 with the authorship of the ‘Vestiges* — but all 
 denied it. Of course the book had an author; 
 but I am not able to tell you his name. In this 
 book, what is called the ‘ Development Theory 
 was openly maintained. Unlike Lamarck, who 
 was an atheist, this author, with expressions of 
 reverence, acknowledged the existence of the Crea- 
 tor ; and maintained that this theory of the ‘ deve- 
 lopment * of one plant out of another, and of one 
 animal out of another, in conformity with a divinely 
 appointed law of advancing improvement, was as 
 worthy an idea of the Almighty Maker’s way of 
 creating, as our common idea of special and sepa- 
 rate creations. 
 
 ‘ Equivocal ’ or ‘ Spontaneous * Generation, how- 
 ever, seemed to be an article in the belief of the 
 author of the ‘ Vestiges.* Some of you may be old 
 enough to remember the noise that was made, 
 about that time, concerning the experiments of 
 Mr. Crosse, in electricity and galvanism. It was 
 affirmed that Mr. Crosse had made an insect, and 
 it was proposed to call it the ‘ Acarus Crossii,* in 
 
12 
 
 DECLINE OF THE ‘ VESTIGES/ 
 
 honour of its scientific maker ! Poor Mr. Crosse 
 publicly avowed his utter innocence of any such 
 creation, and affirmed he had seen the ‘ Acarus ’ in 
 question many a time before he beheld it in the alka- 
 line solution made use of in his galvanic experiment. 
 It was said he gave up his study and his experi- 
 ments, in disgust with the use which had been made 
 of his name. But Mr. Weekes took up the study ; 
 and his experiments were understood to strengthen 
 the advocates of ‘Spontaneous Generation.* The 
 author of the ‘ Vestiges * evidently inclined to 
 their side; and, very soon, some of the reviews 
 declared that he was only a concealed atheist. 
 Indeed, so little apparent encouragement was 
 given to the ‘Development* hypothesis by the 
 press and the public, and so slight patronage 
 seemed to favour it from men of science, that it 
 was supposed we should soon hear no more of it 
 
MR. DARWIN AND MR. WALLACE. 
 
 13 
 
 HI. 
 
 MR. CHARLES DARWIN, AND ‘ THE ORIGIN OF 
 SPECIES BY NATURAL SELECTION.’ 
 
 B ut, on the I St of July, 1858, two papers 
 were produced for reading before the Linnsean 
 Society, on the ‘Origin of Species,’ one written 
 by Mr. Charles Darwin, and the other by Mr. 
 Alfred Wallace. They were both naturalists of 
 some fame. Mr. Wallace had contributed to our 
 knowledge of animated nature in Malacca and 
 the islands of the Indian Archipelago; and Mr. 
 Darwin, by his charming book, ‘ A Naturalist’s 
 Voyage round the World,’ and other services to 
 science, had won high reputation. Mr. Wallace, 
 aware of the long and large preparations made by 
 Mr. Darwin, gave up to him the task of intro- 
 ducing their similar ideas to the public ; and, in 
 November, 1859, Mr. Darwin’s book appeared, 
 
14 MEANING OF ‘NATURAL SELECTION.’ 
 
 announcing the theory which has made so much 
 noise in the world : ‘ The Origin of Species, by 
 Natural Selection.* 
 
 Some of us opened the book with indescribable 
 curiosity, for the latter part of its title led us to 
 wonder what the author could mean. Selection^ of 
 any kind, we reflected, must be an intelligent pro- 
 cess : it could only be the action of mind. But 
 what could be meant by Natural Selection ? We 
 found that in his first chapter, under the general 
 title of ‘ Variation under Domestication,* the 
 author treated of what he called ‘Selection by 
 Man ; * and in the second chapter, under the 
 general head of ‘ Variation under Nature,* he 
 introduced us to his theory of ‘ Natural Selection,* 
 — but showed us more fully what he meant in his 
 third chapter, which was entitled * Struggle for 
 Existence.* 
 
 This struggle for existence — this battle of life — 
 Mr. Darwin contends, is perpetually going on, 
 both among plants and animals, — for every kind 
 of plant and animal tends to increase so rapidly, 
 that if every seed which falls to the earth were to 
 grow, and every animal which is born were to live. 
 
MEANING OF ‘NATURAL SELECTION.’ 
 
 15 
 
 there would soon be neither plants nor animals. 
 In the struggle for existence, continued life is 
 secured for the plants and animals which are best 
 able to maintain themselves in existence. A 
 stronger plant exhausts the soil, and thus annihi- 
 lates the plant which is weaker. If, in a nest ’of 
 half a dozen young birds, two have longer and 
 stronger wings, claws, and bills than the others, 
 and this pair of birds breed, they will stand a 
 better chance of life than weaker birds — especially 
 if there comes a scarcity — because they can fly 
 farther, and will have more strength to get food. 
 
 Again, the colour of certain birds gives them a 
 better chance of life. Our grouse and partridge 
 would soon disappear altogether if they were birds 
 of bright colours ; but because they resemble the 
 colour of the soil and vegetation amidst which 
 they live, they are neither annihilated by the guns 
 of sportsmen nor by the ravages of creatures of 
 prey. On the other hand, the white grouse, or 
 ptarmigan, is comparatively secure in Norway, 
 because it is of the colour of the snow. So, also, 
 insects which are preyed upon by birds are pre- 
 served the more easily by being of the colour of 
 
l6 MR. DARWIN DEMANDS TIME. 
 
 the leaves or stalks of plants. This is not * Design/ 
 — it is ‘ Natural Selection.’ 
 
 A few more words will enable you completely to 
 understand what Mr. Darwin really means by his 
 doctrine of the Origin of Species by Natural Selec- 
 tion. “ Like produces like,” as we commonly say. 
 But we all know that, in the production of plants 
 and animals, we constantly see degrees of unlike- 
 ness. Now Mr. Darwin contends that the tendency 
 to produce unlikeness is sufficient to account for 
 all the different plants and animals which have 
 ever come into existence. Only, he demands 
 unlimited time. Hundreds of years, or hundreds 
 of thousands of years, are not sufficient : he must 
 have millions of years. And then, he maintains, 
 it is perfectly possible that all the known classes, 
 orders, genera, families, and species, of both plants 
 and animals, may have come to exist by one varia- 
 tion — however small — being added to another, and 
 that to another, and so on. 
 
 Nay, he contends, that not only the forms and 
 changes of physical structure in animals, but even 
 their degrees of instinct and intelligence, and their 
 propensities and habits, have grown by Natural 
 
THINKS WE COME OUT OF APES 
 
 17 
 
 Selection. As for man, Mr. Darwin maintains 
 that he is descended from a hairy quadruped with 
 a tail and pointed ears, that was accustomed to 
 live in trees. He means that we come out of the 
 apes and monkeys. Lastly, he believes that our 
 moral nature — our highest nature — is derived from 
 the lower animals; for “the dog manifests love, 
 reverence, fidelity, and obedience ; ” and so the 
 religious sentiment in man comes by Natural 
 Selection, as well as his physical form or animal 
 nature. 
 
i8 
 
 MR. Darwin's first converts. 
 
 IV. 
 
 MR. HERBERT SPENCER AND ‘ EVOLUTION ’ — THE 
 SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY — MR. DARWIN'S RE- 
 JECTION OF ‘final causes' — THE GERMAN 
 PHILOSOPHERS. 
 
 MONG the first men of science to declare 
 
 ^ ^ their acceptance of Mr. Darwin's theory, 
 were Professor Huxley, and the present President 
 of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Hooker, who 
 superintends the great botanical collections at 
 Kew, and who has contributed so richly to our 
 knowledge of the plants of India. But the es- 
 pousal of Mr. Darwin’s theory by Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer was more notable than the conversion to 
 it of any of the men of science. Mr. Darwin calls 
 him ‘ our great philosopher,' and Professor 
 Tyndal calls him ‘ the apostle of the understand- 
 ing ; ' and some are bold enough to affirm that 
 
HIS GREAT CONVERT, MR. SPENCER. 
 
 19 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer knows everythmg — nay, it is 
 said that he himself thinks so ! You laugh ! but 
 consider what an advantage such a conceit gives 
 a man with the majority of mankind. Who be- 
 lieves you to be clever, if you tell people you 
 know nothing ? 
 
 Mr. Darwin was mightily gratified, no doubt, 
 when Mr. Spencer avowed his discipleship ; but 
 the disciple soon chid the master, and told him 
 he had attributed too much to ‘ Natural Selec- 
 tion.’ Mr. Spencer’s enlightened conviction was 
 that we must admit Lamarck’s theory of the 
 Transmutation of Species, and the Development 
 theory of the ‘Vestiges,’ as well; and having 
 Laplace’s Cosmical Theory to start with, we must 
 call this grand compound of theories — Evolution. 
 It is Mr. Spencer’s word, remember, not Mr. 
 Darwin’s ; and Mr. Darwin’s meaning, by the 
 term ‘ Natural Selection ’ is better expressed, 
 Mr. Spencer contends, by the phrase ‘ Survival of 
 the Fittest.’ Of course, you will expect that the 
 * Apostle of the Understanding ’ is a most prolific 
 and superb comer of words and phrases. His 
 crowning work, however, has not yet been men- 
 
20 
 
 MR. SPENCER, AND * EVOLUTION.* 
 
 tioned. Mr. Herbert Spencer has undertaken the 
 creation of what is considered to be an entirely 
 new system of philosophy, w^hich he terms — ‘ The 
 Synthetic ; ’ and it is from him that we are to 
 learn, fully, what is meant by ‘ Evolution.’ 
 
 We are to start with the Cosmical or Nebular 
 Theory of Laplace : the existence of the nebu- 
 losity — the hot, luminous nebulosity of the atoms 
 and molecules of matter which the author of the 
 ‘Vestiges’ called “the revolving fire- mist,” out of 
 which — as it contracted, and the outer part cooled, 
 and threw off rings, — the planets of our solar sys- 
 tem, and, finally, the sun itself, were formed. We 
 are to regard our earth as having been formed 
 from one of these rings. And now, how did life 
 begin upon it ? When the hot nucleus of our 
 earth had cooled so far that some of the cosmic 
 vapour surrounding it had taken the form of water, 
 there w^ould come about that great change which 
 Professor Phillips, the geologist, used to describe : 
 the forming of fissures in the earth’s surface, by 
 shrinkage, and the entrance of water into the 
 fissures ; and thus, by ^the force of steam, the 
 breaking up of the earth’s crust into rocks and 
 
MR. DARWIN'S VIEWS OF HIMSELF. 
 
 21 
 
 seas — into land and water. Life, we are allowed 
 to believe, began in the water : vegetable life and 
 animal life. Portions — most likely microscopic 
 portions — of sea-mucus, or sea-jelly, began to live ; 
 and thus vegetable and animal life was begun ! 
 
 — But begun howV you will ask. I can only 
 reply, somehow — for I know not what other answer 
 to give, or by what other plain word to describe 
 what, in scientific gibberish, they call ‘ Sponta- 
 neous Generation.’ “ A personal God is unthink- 
 able^' says Mr. Herbert Spencer: if any power 
 have originated the universe, he declares it must 
 be an unconscious power. Mr. Darwin, in the 
 announcement of his theory of the ^Origin of 
 Species,’ speaks of ‘the Creator’ — but without 
 any expression of reverence — as having given 
 existence to a few forms of life, or — ^he afterwards 
 says — to one primordial form, from which all other 
 forms, vegetable and animal, have been developed 
 by natural selection : plants, worms, insects, 
 fishes, reptiles, birds, four-footed creatures, and 
 Man, And, in the last chapter of the ‘ Origin of 
 Species,’ he tells us that he sees no good reason 
 why theviews given in his volume should shock 
 
22 
 
 DARWIN REJECTS DR. GRAY’s VIEWS. 
 
 the religious feelings of any one. And he, further, 
 tells us that ‘ a celebrated author and divine * 
 had written to him to say that “he had gradually 
 learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception 
 of the Deity to believe that He created a few 
 original forms capable of self-development into 
 other and needful forms, as to believe that He 
 required a fresh act of creation to supply the 
 voids caused by the action of His laws.” 
 
 Dr. Asa Gray, the great botanist of America, 
 also declared himself a convert to the doctrine of 
 Evolution, but holding fast by the doctrine of 
 Final Causes, said God had guided the variation 
 of plants and animals “ along certain beneficial 
 lines ” just as man guides water “ along definite 
 and useful lines of irrigation.” But Mr. Darwin 
 rejected Dr. Gray’s conclusion, and denied that 
 “ the formation of the most perfectly adapted 
 animals in the world, man included, were inten- 
 tionally and specially guided.” 
 
 It was not long before the German philosophers, 
 who had adopted Mr. Darwin’s views, turned 
 round upon him, and showed him the real atheism 
 there is in his scheme. Carl Vogt boldly told 
 
HOW GERMANY RECEIVES DARWIN. 
 
 23 
 
 him that his theory “ turns the Creator out of 
 doors, and does not leave the smallest room for 
 the agency of such a Being.” “ The first living 
 germ being granted,” Carl Vogt goes on to say, 
 
 the process of Evolution will account for all we 
 see. Man is not a special creation, produced in 
 a different way, and distinct from other animals, 
 endowed with an individual soul and animated by 
 the breath of God ; on the contrary, man is only 
 the highest product of the progressive evolution of 
 animal life springing from the group of apes next 
 below him.” 
 
 And Carl Vogt only speaks out in bolder lan- 
 guage what many of his countrymen say of Mr. 
 Darwin’s theory. Haeckel, who is considered the 
 chief naturalist of Germany, also announces athe- 
 ism ; and Mr. Darwin, in his ‘ Descent of Man,^ 
 claims Haeckel’s kinship in science, and declares 
 that if the German’s book had been published 
 earlier, his own might not have been written : thus 
 seeming to endorse Haeckel’s doctrines. ‘ Evolu- 
 tion,’ from the showing of its chief disciples, thus 
 leaves us to gross materialism, the denial of the 
 design argument, and of God’s existence. Matter 
 
24 
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF EVOLUTION. 
 
 is eternal, and its forces are eternal. The material 
 universe has always existed ; but God has never 
 existed. Christianity is only a dream : there is no 
 soul : there is no future state : this is our only exist- 
 ence : when we die, we pass into annihilation. 
 
 I learn that some of you young men imagine it 
 is very wise to become Evolutionists, and that you 
 can retain your belief as Christians, at the same 
 time. Then, I assure you, you must have a dif- 
 ferent set of ideas from Mr. Darwin^s. So you will 
 find it to be — only think, a little. 
 
WANT OF FACTS FOR ‘EVOLUTION/ 
 
 25 
 
 V. 
 
 TRUTH OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY CHALLENGED ; 
 AND ITS ABSURDITIES EXHIBITED. 
 
 UT where are the facts ? ” you will be say- 
 
 ing; and that is speaking English. The 
 facts are what we demand, before we accept any 
 theory. That is the great lesson taught us by 
 Newton and Bacon ; and we shall not depart from 
 
 it. But neither Mr. Darwin, nor Professors Huxley 
 and Tyndall, nor Mr. Herbert Spencer, nor Carl 
 yVogt, nor Haeckel, dare to assure us that Evolution 
 V is ever witnessed now, or has ever been witnessed 
 
 in the past. {So that JJiere are~ho fdctsry 
 
 “Oh, sir, you don’t understand what you are 
 talking about,” some of the more confident parti- 
 sans of the theory will say: “read Mr. Darwin’s 
 book with clearer discernment. He tells you, 
 what every botanist will tell you, that there are 
 
 3 
 
26 
 
 MR. DARWIN^S EXPLANATION 
 
 forty different kinds of wild brambles and twenty 
 different kinds of wild roses ; and yet the brambles 
 have, doubtless, originated with one kind, and the 
 wild roses have all come out of the Rosa canina^ 
 or common Dog-rose. The insects have done it 
 all by inoculation. Mr. Darwin — who has paid 
 very special and laborious attention to pigeon- 
 breeding — will also assure you that there are three 
 hundred and forty kinds of tame pigeons ; and that 
 there can be no doubt that they have all originated 
 with the common Blue Rock pigeon : now that 
 kind of pigeon has but fourteen feathers in its tail, 
 while the Fantail pigeon has often forty ! ! ! 
 
 ^Then think of the various breeds of dogs : 
 there is the terrier, the ladies’ lap dog, the King 
 Charles’s dog, the pointer, the retriever, the mastiff, 
 the bloodhound, the Newfoundland dog, the noble 
 St. Bernard’s dog, the elegant fleet greyhound, and 
 that thoroughly English dog — the bull-dog, which 
 seizes the bull by the nose, and never leaves go ! 
 Doubtless, they have also originated with one 
 stock ” 
 
 “Nay,” says Mr. Darwin himself, “I think they 
 must be derived from three or four stocks.” “Quite 
 
AND DEFENCE OF HIS THEORY. 
 
 27 
 
 a mistake/’ say some ; “ the dog is certainly derived 
 from the wolf.” ‘‘Nay, from the jackal,” says 
 another ; while some positively affirm that the 
 common shepherd’s dog is the original animal, and 
 all other dogs are derived from ixjJ 
 
 “ But, think again,” say the Darwinians, “ of the 
 power man has to alter and improve the breeds of 
 sheep and cattle and horses; and think of the 
 power their increasing knowledge gives to our 
 gardeners to furnish us with superior carrots and 
 turnips and lettuces and other vegetables — with 
 superior plums and peaches and apples and pears — 
 and with finer and more variegated flowers ! ” 
 Evolution ! my Darwinian friends — you have not 
 touched it, with all your facts. This is all Variety: 
 it is not Evolution. But we need none of your 
 petty array of the instances of Variety. Variety is 
 the stamp and seal God puts upon all He does 
 in Nature. God never makes two creatures alike 
 of any kind. His patterns vary perpetually and 
 universally. He never makes two flowers alike of 
 any kind : no two petals in the corolla of any one 
 flower are alike : no two sepals in the calyx of any 
 one flower are alike : no stamens of any one flower 
 
VARIETY IS NOT EVOLUTION. 
 
 are alike : no two leaves on the same flower-stalk 
 are alike : no two sides of the same leaf are alike. 
 No two insects, birds, beasts, or fishes of the same 
 kind are alike : no two human beings are alike. 
 No two hairs of the human head were ever ex- 
 amined under a microscope and found to be alike : 
 no two human faces are alike : no two chins are 
 alike : no two noses are alike : no two eyes in the 
 same face are alike. 
 
 ‘‘What, sir!’' exclaims some young lady, ‘Mo 
 you mean to insult me by telling me that I have 
 two odd eyes ? — for shame of yourself, sir 1 ” 
 
 My dear young lady, your eyes may be as 
 brilliant as diamonds — so that they sometimes 
 make that young gentleman’s heart ache but they 
 are not alike. Do but examine them, courageously, 
 in your looking-glass ; and you will find itfOut. 
 
 Evolution 1 I say again, you have been talking 
 about Variety — but not about Evolution. You 
 know of no gardener who can evolve an apple- 
 tree out of a damask rose, or a tulip out of a 
 hyacinth, or a dahlia out of a marigold. Can 
 you tell us of any man who has ever bred a pigeon 
 into a jackdaw, or a jackdaw into a raven — a 
 
/ 
 
 SENSIBLE REBUKE BY VIRCHOW. 29 
 
 sparrow into a sparrow-hawk, a fantail into a 
 pheasant, a tumbler into a turkey — a greyhound 
 into a tiger — or a bull-dog into a buffalo ? Breed 
 as you will, your pigeons are all pigeons still : you 
 cannot advance them into hawks, falcons, or 
 eagles. Breed as you will, your dogs are all dogs 
 still — and they will all go to the dogs. Where are 
 your facts? You have none; and so your theory 
 must remain a theory. 
 
 The speech of Virchow — one of the most eminent 
 men in Germany — lately delivered at Munich, at 
 the annual meeting of Men of Science, will, it is 
 hoped, tend to render the German evolutionists a 
 little more modest, and teach them not to forget 
 that they are, after all, only theorists. Haeckel 
 and Nageli proposed that they should now claim to 
 have the direction of education in Germany, and 
 should demand to have the new doctrines taught. 
 Virchow told them plainly that they could make 
 no such demand. “So long,” says he, “as no 
 one can define for me the properties of carbon, 
 hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in such a way that 
 I can conceive how, from the sum of them, a soul 
 arises, so long am I unable to admit that we should 
 
30 
 
 SENSIBLE REBUKE BY VIRCHOW. 
 
 be at all justified in importing the plastidulic soul 
 into the course of our education. . . . On the con- 
 trary, I am of opinion that, before we originate 
 such hypotheses as the voice of science — before 
 we say ‘ This is modern science,’ we should first 
 have to conduct a long series of careful investiga- 
 tions. We must therefore say to the teachers in 
 schools, ‘ Do not teach it,^ 
 
 “As a matter of fact,” Virchow also tells his 
 brothers in science, “ we must positively recognize 
 that as yet there always exists a sharp line of 
 demarcation between man and the ape. We can- 
 not teach — 7ve cannot pronounce it to be a conquest of 
 science^ that man descends from the ape or fi'om any 
 other animalP Such are the clear declarations 
 made by one of the leading minds of Germany ; 
 such is his honest protest against concluding that 
 the doctrines of Spontaneous Generation and Evo- 
 lution are proven. 
 
 One does not wish to say aught disrespectful of 
 a man like Mr. Darwin. As an untiring inspector 
 of Nature and collector of facts, even of the 
 minutest description — in other words, as a diligent 
 contributor to the stores of human knowledge, Mr. 
 
HOW DARWINISM SPREAD QUICKLY. 
 
 31 
 
 Darwin deserves honour; but he seems to coax 
 himself into the belief th at his theory - be true^y 
 notwithstanding all the difficulties — and even the 
 unlikelihoods — he confesses that he sees in the 
 way of such belief. 
 
 The rapidity with which Mr. Darwin’s theory 
 was spread, applauded, and considered to be 
 established, must be regarded as one of the most 
 remarkable facts of our time. But it is not difficult 
 to account for the fact. When Mr. Wallace 
 yielded to Mr. Darwin the priority of publication, 
 it was understood that Mr. Wallace would support 
 his friend. A number of naturalists, who were 
 common friends of both, also threw all their 
 strength into the effort to popularise the theory. 
 They soon secured the adhesion and active services 
 of a number of understrappers — members of scien- 
 tific societies, and workers on magazines, reviews, 
 and newspapers. As for the chiefs — Mr. Darwin 
 himself. Professors Tyndall and Huxley, Sir Joseph 
 Hooker, and Mr. Herbert Spencer — they consti- 
 tute what the shrewd American writer, Wendell 
 Holmes, calls ‘The Mutual Admiration Society.' 
 They are perpetually bespattering one another with 
 
32 
 
 MR. Darwin’s fine fancies. 
 
 praise. And when Mr. Darwin received his Doctor’s 
 degree, at Cambridge, in the congratulation-meeting 
 held afterwards by his friends and admirers, Pro- 
 fessor Huxley declared that Mr. Darwin was “ the 
 greatest philosopher since Aristotle ! ” 
 
 This ecstatic laudation is a little amusing, when 
 one considers some items of Mr. Darwin’s philo- 
 Sophy. In the first edition of his ^Origin of Species,’ 
 the author sagely intimated that the whale might 
 have been formed by ‘ Natural Selection ’ out of a 
 Polar bear that found he could live, as the whale 
 now lives, by swimming about with his mouth open, 
 and swallowing the minute creatures that come 
 into it ! Our sage philosopher — the greatest since 
 Aristotle” — left all that out in his second edition, 
 and it has never appeared since ! 
 
 One cannot help wishing that Mr. Darwin had 
 left out that equally marvellous imagination about 
 the formation of the eye by ‘Natural Selection. 
 My copy of the book is one of the ‘ 5th thousand.’ 
 At page 186, Mr. Darwin, who rejects the doctrine 
 of Final Causes, or Divine Contrivance — but who 
 cannot write without using the word ^contrivance^ 
 over and over again — admits that “to suppose 
 
MR. DARWIN'S STRANGE EYE-THEORY. 33 
 
 that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances 
 for adjusting the focus to different distances, for 
 admitting different amounts of light, and for the 
 correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, 
 could have been formed by Natural Selection, 
 seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest 
 degree possible.’’ Yet, he goes on to assure us 
 that ‘ Reason tells him ’ this is possible. He says 
 “we ought, in imagination, to take a thick layer 
 of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to 
 light beneath — [he does not tell us where he gets 
 this nerve, to begin with !] — and then suppose 
 every part of this layer to be continually changing 
 slowly in density,” and “ each new state of the 
 instrument to be multiplied by the million,” — and 
 thus, in “ millions on millions of years,” he thinks 
 we may get a most excellent eye ! Do not, any 
 of you, think me harsh when I tell you that when 
 I first read this passage in the famous ‘Origin of 
 Species,’ I could not help saying to myself—* If 
 Mr. Darwin had not put his name to this, should 
 I not Jiay£_concluded that it was writtea-in a 
 lunatic asylum?* 
 
34 
 
 MR. DARWIN AND THE BIRDS. 
 
 VI. 
 
 MR. Darwin’s theory of ‘sexual selection’ — 
 ITS irreverence towards the great maker 
 — very different thinkings of other 
 
 INTELLECTUAL MEN. 
 
 L et no one suppose that the fine fancies of 
 > ‘‘the greatest philosopher since Aristotle” 
 are bounded by his marvellous conception of 
 ‘Natural Selection.’ In his next book ‘The 
 Descent of Man/ we are treated with a new fancy : 
 ‘ Sexual Selection.’ Mr. Darwin’s fertile imagina- 
 tion leads him to believe that the greater strength 
 of male animals, and the several other advantages 
 they have over females, are really owing to the 
 preference of the females. And our fertile-brained 
 pnilosopher gives us two hundred pages on Sexual 
 Selection among Birds, wherein he assures us that 
 the brilliant colours and adornments of many of the 
 
DISPLAYS LITTLE KNOWLEDGE OF ‘ THE SEX/ 35 
 
 male birds, are owing to the taste and desire of the 
 female birds. The hen desires to see a fine feather 
 in a cock’s tail, and so it grows there ! The pea- 
 hen desires and loves to see the eye-pattern and 
 splendid colours in the peacock’s tail, and so they 
 grow there — generation after generation ! 
 
 The great philosopher cannot be greatly ac- 
 quainted with ‘ the sex,’ or he would have never 
 imagined that the female birds have taken such a 
 stupid delight in seeing the same ornaments of the 
 male birds for thousands of years. What! have all 
 the pea-hens, for thousands of years, been enraptured 
 with that one uniform pattern in the peacock’s tail ? 
 The stupid creatures 1 had we worn tails, like 
 peacocks, the ladies would have demanded a new 
 pattern every month! 
 
 Seriously, this is not mere folly on the part of 
 Mr. Darwin It is a denial of God’s power, and 
 wisdom perfections. A correct mind cannot 
 
 look O - -- oeautiful bird, or a beautiful flower, 
 without reverencing the power and wisdom of God, 
 in their formation. MnJQaLwim 4^ies that God 
 iajth£jreat Artificer. He admits no design of the 
 Almighty in Nature. The birds have beautiful 
 
36 JIEFINED SENTIMENT OF W. J. FOX, 
 
 colours because the females like to see them, he 
 f oolishly im agines, not because God delights in 
 che Beautiful. 
 
 I must tell you how much Mr. Darwin’s whim- 
 sical theory of Sexual Selection degrades him in 
 my humble estimation, when I remember how 
 different were the thoughts of some of the intel- 
 lectual men that I happen to have known. How 
 different, for instance, were the thinkings of my 
 eloquent friend, W. J. Fox — whose name some of 
 you simply know as that of the late M.P. for 
 Oldham — but others as that of the most perfect 
 and refined orator of his time. He would often 
 descant delightfully on the music of Keats and 
 Shelley and Byron, and Milton, and Shakspere, 
 and insist that the ineffable melody of their verse 
 rendered them the highest poets, in our estimation, 
 and justly so, for it proved their transcendent sense 
 of the Beautiful. And so,” he would say, “ the 
 Infinite Maker fills His Creation with forms of such 
 excelling and incomparable beauty, because He 
 has the highest and most perfect sense of the 
 Beautiful — -fo7' God is the greatest Poet” 
 
 And, some of you who have read the Life of 
 
A DYING SAYING OF CHARLES KINGSLEY. 37 
 
 noble Charles Kingsley, will remember how it is 
 therein related that, in his last illness, in the dead 
 of the night, he was overheard by his little daughter 
 saying, in a clear voice — ‘‘ How beautiful God is ! 
 His fine mind, (which was filled with such deep 
 love of Nature, was, doubtless, in his sleeplessness, 
 summoning to remembrance some of the scenes 
 and forms of beauty he had been familiar with; 
 and reflecting that He who made the Beautiful in 
 Nature, must, in Himself, have all possible per- 
 fection, he uttered these simple, yet remarkable 
 words. 
 
 I delight to call such men as the two I have just 
 named my benefactors, rather than my friends — for 
 I never learned aught but reverence for the Maker 
 from them, when they spoke of Him. And I 
 delight, still more, to remember that Newton and 
 the highest minds that gave themselves to the 
 study of nature, were foremost in reverence for 
 God. How mournful, how deplorable, it is that 
 our modern philosophers disdain to tread in the 
 steps of their illustrious predecessors, and seem 
 bent on ignoring the Divine Name 1 
 
38 
 
 DUKE OF ARGYLL'S BOOK. 
 
 VII. 
 
 *THE REIGN OF LAW ' — A WORD ABOUT ‘USELESS 
 
 organs' — MR. Darwin's forgetfulness of 
 
 THE FORESIGHT EVIDENT IN GOD's CREATION. 
 
 NE of the keenest blows levelled at Mr. 
 
 Darwin's theory is that by the Duke of 
 Argyll, in his book entitled ‘The Reign of Law.' 
 Mr. Darwin says it took millions of years to bring 
 the eye to its present perfection ; then how long, 
 asks the Duke, did it take to bring a wing to per- 
 fection ? How could any creature use a wing that 
 was only partly grown — even if it were more than 
 half-grown ? The essay that follows, in the same 
 book, on ‘ Contrivance in the machinery for flight,' 
 is most excellent. Get the ‘ Reign of Law,' if you 
 have not seen it. When you have read all which is 
 there introduced on ‘ Contrivance in the machinery 
 for flight,' and read it thoughtfully, I do not believe 
 
THE * DESIGN ’ WE DO SEE. 
 
 39 
 
 you will think Mr. Darwin^s theory to be a very 
 sensible one. 
 
 ‘‘ Useless organs ” are much dwelt upon by the 
 advocates of ‘ Natural Selection.’ You cannot ex- 
 plain why they are found in man and the animals 
 without their theory, they contend — while ‘Natural 
 Selection ’ leads them to perceive that when such 
 useless organs are found in an animal they are to 
 be regarded as remains of the creature from which 
 the new animal has been evolved, or developed. 
 
 But suppose we cannot give the true answer to 
 the questions— Why has the whale teeth, and why 
 has man teats on the breast, which are of no use? — 
 are we to be so foolish as to give up all we do know, 
 because of that, and say we see no proofs of design 
 or contrivance in nature, although they surround us 
 on every side? Am I to be such an idiot as to 
 profess that, having examined the human hand and 
 arm, I cannot see that it is composed of parts put 
 together for a purpose — notwithstanding the know- 
 ledge of all it enables me to do, I can see no proof 
 that it is the work of matchless Intelligence and 
 Power ? Because I cannot understand everything, 
 am I to stultify myself by declaring that I know 
 nothing ? 
 
40 THE EYE A PROOF OF GOD'S FORESIGHT. 
 
 Do we not reckon foresight as one of the highest — 
 perhaps, the very highest — intellectual power in man? 
 We cannot, if we have any faculty of observation, 
 fail to mark foresight as one of the surest proofs of ^ 
 the All-wise Maker’s presence in Nature. Remem- 
 ber where the eye is formed. Not where any 
 so-called ‘ Laws of Light ’ can operate upon it ; 
 but in the dark cavern of the womb ! There, the 
 spherical eyeball, the lenses with different refracting 
 powers, the iris — or coloured rim for enabling us 
 to admit or exclude degrees of light, and the 
 mysterious provision for instant focussing — have all 
 to be .formed. And when the beautiful eye opens 
 on the light, the beautiful and transcendent light 
 opens on the eye ; the adaptation — the inter- 
 adaptation — is perfect. Oh, how strangely — I had 
 almost said, how madly — in love with his theory of 
 ‘ Natural Selection ’ must Mr. Darwin be, that he 
 cannot see, or cannot acknowledge, all this to be 
 the workmanship of the Divine Workmaster, and 
 most indubitable proof of His glorious presence in 
 Nature ! 
 
 I cannot omit, for a moment, to point you to the 
 formation of the lungs of the infant, while I am 
 
THE LUNGS ANOTHER PROOF. 4 1 
 
 inviting you to consider the eye. Remember, the 
 lungs are formed where there can be no breathing. 
 The life of the young creature in the womb is a 
 part of the life of the mother while it remains 
 there. There the delicate, silken-looking tissue of 
 the lungs is formed ; and they are packed and 
 folded with an appearance of order and symmetry 
 that is wondrous. There, also, the minutely slender 
 air-vessels and blood-vessels are all formed and com- 
 pleted. And when the delicate lungs feel the air, 
 it fills them, and the young creature breathes and 
 enters on its new life : the lungs are fitted for the 
 air, and the air for the lungs ; the adaptation — the 
 interadaptation — is perfect. Is it not amazing that 
 Mr. Darwin is so wildly in love with his theory 
 of ‘Natural Selection,’ that he cannot see, or 
 acknowledge, this to be an undeniable proof of the 
 perfect foresight and power of the Divine Work- 
 master, who thus fits and prepares a living creature 
 in one state for living and enjoying existence in a 
 nobler state? 
 
 4 
 
42 
 
 WILD THEORIES IN GERMANY. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 HAECKEL AND THE PLASTIDULIC SOUL— PESSIMISM 
 IN GERMANY — NECESSITARIAN TEACHING OF 
 PROFESSOR TYNDALL, AND ITS RUINOUS TEN- 
 DENCY. 
 
 I N Germany, with Haeckel as its chief champion, 
 Evolution is pronounced to be unquestionable, 
 and Religion is declared to be only fit for dotards 
 and idiots. The true doctrine is ‘ Monism,’ or 
 One-ism : a belief in the sole existence of matter. 
 There is nothing spiritual in the universe. All 
 Matter is alive ; and Thought is a property of Matter, 
 and ripens by Evolution. When the protoplasm, or 
 bioplasm, — the first cell of an organism of the 
 lower creatures, — is formed of carbon, oxygen, hy- 
 drogen and nitrogen, a plastidulic soul is formed. 
 This material soul ripens into sentience ; in the 
 vertebrates into instinct ; and in the higher mam- 
 
PESSIMISM IN GERMANY. 
 
 43 
 
 malia into intelligence. When Man dies, the plasti- 
 dulic soul ceases to be — for Man’s future is, simply, 
 annihilation of all consciousness. 
 
 In addition to Monism, another dreary and mos.t 
 wretched form of unbelief has arisen in Germany. 
 It is the doctrine of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and 
 others, and our writers call it ‘Pessimism.’ Leibnitz, 
 the great rival of our Newton, in the discovery of 
 the calculus, taught Optimism — or the doctrine 
 that all things are for the best ; but these writers 
 teach Pessimism — or the doctrine that all things 
 are for the worst. Human life, they affirm, is 
 guided by Necessity. Man has no Free-will. He 
 is but a poor miserable creature who cannot help 
 himself, or help what he does. He and his chil- 
 dren are the helpless prey of all sorts of diseases 
 and disasters. Death dogs his steps, both on sea 
 and land. Disappointment and disgust are his 
 portion. He is not so happy as a bird ; and a bird 
 is not so happy as an oyster. The only happi- 
 ness for man will be when he dies, and sinks into 
 eternal unconsciousness. 
 
 One feels some doubt whether these grand phi- 
 losophers really believe their grim theories. For, 
 
44 
 
 PESSIMISM, A NATURAL RESULT. 
 
 if they did, we cannot help thinking that we should 
 hear of them and their disciples, by scores, cutting 
 their own throats, or hanging or drowning them- 
 selves, every week. When a man chooses to livej 
 he cannot feel it to be so very hard and miserablei 
 after all. 
 
 But, seriously, who can wonder that Pessimism 
 is the form that Unbelief has, at length, taken in 
 what we have been accustomed to call ‘ the great 
 intellectual German Fatherland 7 When men come 
 to persuade themselves that there is no God, and 
 no hereafter — when they voluntarily relinquish the 
 elevating hope and trust that there is a nobler and 
 better state for Man, when this probationary life is 
 ended, and cease to believe that it is worth living 
 a holy life that we may win that higher state — 
 who can wonder that dark discontent takes posses- 
 sion of the soul, and existence comes to be re- 
 garded as a curse rather than a blessing? When 
 a man persuades himself that there is no truth 
 worth seeking for, no cause worth suffering for, no 
 purity worth striving after, no nobleness in life 
 itself — one cannot wonder that he comes, at last, 
 to look upon everything around him with disgust, 
 and to say that life is not worth having. The only 
 
NECESSITARIAN TEACHING OF TYNDALL, 45 
 
 wonder is, that he cleaves to life when he regards 
 it as one dreary experience of wretchedness. 
 
 Well, but,” some of you will say, “ our English 
 Men of Science have not joined the Pessimists of 
 Germany. They have not enunciated this doctrine 
 of misery in England.” 
 
 True : yet, they have taken the steps leading to 
 it. Huxley proclaims that man is an Automaton — 
 a mere machine ; and Tyndall declares that Free- 
 will is a misnomer, and that what a man does he 
 cannot help, even if it be murder. To my mind 
 there is no teaching so pernicious as to tell a 
 man that he cannot help what he does. What is 
 to lead a man to struggle against temptation, if 
 you bring him to believe that he cannot help 
 what he does ? What is to prevent his moral ruin ? 
 what is to induce him to refrain from committing 
 a wrong, especially if he believes he shall not be 
 found out? Could you trust such a man with 
 your wife — with your daughter — with your money ? 
 
 No moral man that I have ever known really 
 believed that he could not help what he did. I 
 am sure of that — although I have known several 
 
46 RUINOUS TENDENCY OF SUCH TEACHING. 
 
 highly moral men who professed to believe that 
 they were ‘ the creatures of circumstance ’ ; for 
 their own uprightness of dealing, their own anxiety 
 to do right, and their hot displeasure with those 
 who did wrong, proved that they did hot believe 
 that men cannot help what they do. 
 
 It is a great crime, I humbly think, for a man 
 like Professor Tyndall to proclaim such a doctrine. 
 It is the way to render human beings indifferent 
 to the voice of conscience, and so to lead them 
 to moral degradation. Put out a man’s eyes? — 
 you would not blind him half so effectually and 
 ruinously as you would if you could succeed in 
 quenching the inner light of his moral nature. 
 Paralyze a man in every limb ? — you would not 
 render him a thousandth part so utterly helpless 
 and decrepit, as you would if you could succeed 
 in dethroning within him the rectoral power of 
 conscience. 
 
 The leaves of the ‘ Stone Book,’ it is affirmed, 
 give indubitable proof of the truth of the Evo- 
 lution doctrine. I, therefore, propose to enter 
 with you on a brief reading of their contents and 
 teachings, to-morrow night. 
 
THE STONE BOOK. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS, 
 
 INTRODUCTION *•••••• 
 
 I. 
 
 BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOLOGY • . • # . 
 
 II. 
 
 CHANGES IN THE THEORIES OF GEOLOGISTS . 
 
 III. 
 
 SKETCH OF THE SCIENCE OF GEOLOGY : PRESENT 
 CLASSIFICATION OF THE LAYERS OF THE EARTH’s 
 CRUST : FORMATIONS AND STRATA : THE AZOIC 
 ROCKS 
 
 IV. 
 
 CLASSIFICATION OF THE ZOIC OR SEDIMENTARY ROCKS, 
 OR LAYERS OF THE EARTH's CRUST, WHICH CON- 
 TAIN PETRIFACTIONS AND MARKS OF EXTINCT 
 VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE .... 
 
 V. 
 
 THE PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC FORMATION : ORDER 
 OF ITS LAYERS OR STRATA ; AND BRIEF DESCRIP- 
 TION OF THEM 
 
 PAGE 
 
 51 
 
 S6 
 
 61 
 
 67 
 
 7 " 
 
 75 
 
 49 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 SO 
 
 VI. 
 
 PETRIFACTIONS — OR, EXTINCT LIFE-FORMS TURNED 
 INTO STONE — FOUND IN THE PRIMARY OR 
 PALi«:OZ 01 C FORMATION 8 o 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC FORMATION : ORDER 
 OF POSITION, AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF ITS 
 LAYERS OR STRATA 92 
 
 VIII. 
 
 PETRIFACTIONS FOUND IN THE SECONDARY OR 
 
 MESOZOIC FORMATION . . . . *97 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE TERTIARY OR KAINOZOIC FORMATION I ORDER 
 OF POSITION, AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF ITS 
 LAYERS OR STRATA IO 5 
 
 X. 
 
 PETRIFACTIONS FOUND IN THE TERTIARY OR KAINO- 
 ZOIC FORMATION . . . . . . IO 9 
 
 XL 
 
 THE GLACIAL THEORY, AND THE GENERAL QUESTION 
 
 OF THE AGE OF THE EARTH - , « .III 
 
THE STONE BOOK. 
 
 ONE of the theories of which I spoke to you 
 
 ^ last night, can be considered new. The 
 notions of De Maillet, and Lamarck, and Darwin — 
 the speculations of Herbert Spencer, and Tyndall, 
 and Huxley, and Haeckel, and Vogt, and the rest — 
 are really but so many varying expansions of the 
 old Ionian philosophy, which was taught by 
 Empedocles and Democritus and Epicurus; and 
 which Lucretius afterwards described in Latin 
 verse. What we were wont to consider as the old 
 worn-out song of the eternity of matter and its 
 forces, and of the formation of all things by the 
 fortuitous concourse of atoms, is now revived, with 
 but little variety in the modulation, A man might 
 lay a wager against odds, and be sure of winning, 
 that you could not mention a modern theory to 
 
52 
 
 GEOLOGY, A NEW SCIENCE. 
 
 him, but he could show you that it was to be 
 found among the ancient Greeks. For, most 
 assuredly, there never was such a set of men in 
 the world for inventing theories as the old Greek 
 philosophers. They would make you theories at a 
 halfpenny a yard, a whole summer’s day long, and 
 begin again eagerly the next morning, and make 
 you as many more. 
 
 Geology, on the other hand, is a new science. 
 The ancients really made no approach to it. We 
 cannot help wondering at this — wondering that 
 early men did not say to one another, ‘What is 
 there under our feet ? Let us dig down as far as 
 we can, and see.^ But there does not seem to 
 have been much curiosity of that kind among 
 early men. Yet there was mining in the early time. 
 Copper and silver mining were both entered upon 
 very early. Iron mining was later. Iron is only 
 mentioned four times in the Pentateuch, while brass 
 is mentioned nearly forty times ; brass — which 
 ought to have been called bronze: nine parts copper 
 and one part tin : for that was the mixed metal of 
 which ancient men made their weapons and other 
 implements, before they made them of iron. Brass 
 
ANCIENTS LEARNED LITTLE OF THE EARTH. 53 
 
 is a modern metal, composed of copper and zinc. 
 It seems past a doubt that the ancients came to 
 Cornwall for their tin : they have left us no record 
 of tin having been found elsewhere. The ‘ surface 
 tin,’ as it is called, of Australia and Tasmania, has 
 nearly put an end to the mining of Cornish tin — 
 which lies deep, and is very expensive in the work- 
 ing. Besides, it has been found that the small 
 island of Banca, which lies between Sumatra and 
 Borneo, contains such an abundance of tin that it 
 can supply all the wants of the world for thousands 
 of years to come. 
 
 When the ancients had finished their mining for 
 the metals, their curiosity seems to have carried 
 them no farther. Even the Greeks, the most in- 
 telligent race in the world, so restless as they were 
 in almost every kind of inquiry, seem to have been 
 as incurious in this respect as other ancient people. 
 That Aristotle should have evinced no desire to 
 know what was in the interior of the earth, and 
 never have proposed to institute such inquiry, 
 seems the most amazing of all facts. A mind of 
 such universal grasp has, perhaps, never existed 
 since among men. He has left us noble treatises 
 
54 
 
 GUESSES OF THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 on natural history and law and government, on 
 logic and rhetoric and poetry, and on morals ; but 
 the idea of the search we speak of never seems 
 to have entered into his mind. 
 
 Ovid, in the ‘ Metamorphoses,' tells us a good 
 deal of what Pythagoras and the Greek philosophers 
 taught, by way of guess and deduction mingled, as 
 to the changes the earth had undergone : how 
 earthquakes and other natural phoenomena had 
 effected such changes, and how they reasoned, 
 when they found sea-shells on high hills and far 
 inland, that parts of the land had once been sea, 
 and the sea land. But the ancients seem to have 
 made the most monstrous blunders— judging from 
 the curious details in the ‘ Natural History ’ of 
 Pliny the elder — respecting petrifactions, when they 
 were dug up. There can be little doubt that what 
 were believed to be the disentombed skeletons of 
 human giants were often, in reality, the remains of 
 ancient saurians and other monstrous inhabitants 
 of the old world. The great Italian painter, 
 I>eonardo da Vinci, who was a man of almost 
 universal knowledge, startled some people, one day, 
 who brought him some immense petrifactions, by 
 
DANGER OF THINKING, IN OLD TIMES. 55 
 
 telling them that the bones could never have 
 belonged to any such creatures as were then on 
 the earth, but must have belonged to gigantic 
 animals which lived on the earth in past ages. 
 That is about four hundred years ago ; and Da 
 Vinci seems to have been about the first person on 
 record who made such a truthful remark. 
 
 And, indeed, it would have been dangerous to 
 make free remarks, either as to what might be the 
 antiquity of the earth, or as to what animals lived 
 upon it before Man, — in countries where Popery 
 held sway, four hundred years ago. 
 
56 FALSE STEPS, MANY YEARS AGO. 
 
 I 
 
 BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOLOGY. 
 
 WO hundred years ago, Hooke, and Ray, and 
 
 -L Woodward, members of the newly instituted 
 ‘ Royal Society,* and others, were full of anxious 
 speculations about the nature of the earth*s interior 
 and the causes of the formation of its crust. Dr. 
 Thomas Burnett was also famous for his imposing 
 book respecting the ancient earth. Sir Charles 
 Lyell, in his ‘ Principles of Geology,* — the great 
 text-book of the science, will give you a deal of 
 interesting information respecting these famous 
 English speculators of two hundred years ago. 
 Nearly all of them threw one great hindrance in 
 their own way, and in the way of others, as Sir 
 Charles will tell you, by trying to make all their 
 speculations conformable with what they believed 
 to be the meaning of the Bible account, and then 
 
FEUDS OF NEPTUNISTS AND VULCANISTS. 57 
 
 quarrelling about it. Hooke, Ray, and Woodward, 
 once formed the sensible resolution of entering on 
 practical study, and collected fossil shells and 
 pieces of chalk, coal, slate, and stone, and some 
 other minerals. But they did not persevere ; and 
 yonder lie the collections on the shelves of the 
 Woodwardian Museum in Cambridge, it is said, to 
 this day I 
 
 In 1775, the celebrated German professor of 
 Mineralogy, Werner, began to deliver lectures on 
 the earth’s strata ; and taught, most emphatically, 
 that the changes in the earth’s crust were brought 
 about by the action of water. A rival school was 
 soon started in Edinburgh, by Dr. Hutton, a 
 Scottish physician, who was joined by the illus- 
 trious Playfair, whose beautiful classic monument 
 you will see on the Calton Hill when you visit that 
 most beautiful city. The Scotch school maintained 
 that the transformations of the earth’s crust had 
 been effected chiefly by the agency of fire. So, 
 now, there were the rival schools of the Neptunists, 
 as the party of Werner were called, and of the 
 Plutonists or Vulcanists — for the adherents of 
 Hutton and Playfair were called by both of these 
 
 5 
 
58 WILLIAM SMITH FOUNDS ‘GEOLOGY.' 
 
 terms. Much intelligent discussion, as well as 
 mere wordy warfare, arose between these rival 
 schools ; but geology can scarcely be said to have 
 received its proper foundations from either. 
 
 It was left to a plain man of the plain name of 
 William Smith to become the real father of English 
 Geology. He was a surveyor of land, who began 
 in early life to take notice of the varied forms and 
 sizes of hills, of the different strata or layers of the 
 soil, of the chalk and the flints found in it, and of 
 the various forms of shells found in the different 
 strata. At length, he set about experimental study 
 in thorough earnest, and in 1790 commenced 
 making journeys on foot into every part of England 
 — descending into gravel pits, and stone quarries, 
 and coal-mines, and fissures of the rocks, in order 
 to complete his observations. In 1799 he pub- 
 lished the result of his labours, describing all the 
 strata of England, so far as he had observed them. 
 So the first book, worthy of the name, on the great 
 science of Geology, was only published one year 
 before the close of the last century. In 1815, 
 — the year of the battle of Waterloo, — Wil- 
 liam Smith published the first English Geological 
 
CUVIER GIVES IT REAL IMPORTANCE. 59 
 
 Map. So you see how modern is the science of 
 Geology. 
 
 Since the publication of William Smithes map, 
 scarcely any study has been pursued with so much 
 eagerness as that of Geology. The strata of the 
 earth have been classified, and named, and re- 
 named, several times ; but if no more had been 
 done — if Geology had been confined merely to the 
 study and arrangement of the different layers of the 
 earth’s crust, it would never have risen to be 
 the commanding science which it is now. It was 
 the commanding mind of Cuvier which first gave 
 Geology its true importance. When, by his pro- 
 found knowledge of Osteology, he had foretold that 
 the petrifactions of pachydermatous animals of 
 certain intermediate forms might yet be found, and 
 they were founds and he had arranged the precious 
 relics on the Museum shelves at Paris with his own 
 hand, the scientific wodd became fully awake to 
 the real value of the new science — for they saw 
 how it comprised the great problem of the earth’s 
 antiquity, and the various kinds of life that had 
 existed upon it, and that it might lead to the un- 
 mistakable understanding of the problem. 
 
6o FAMOUS ENGLISH GEOLOGISTS; AND 
 
 The Geological Society of London was soon 
 formed ; and William Smath received a diploma, as 
 an acknowledged man of science ; and he and 
 his nephew Phillips entered on larger labours; a 
 Professorship of Geology, for Buckland, was 
 founded at Oxford, and another at Cambridge, for 
 Sedgwick ; and soon our Murchison and Lyell, 
 and Conybeare, and Forbes, and Ramsay, and 
 others, made themselves famous as Geologists. 
 In France and Germany, and in America, the new 
 science also became the ‘ rage of the day,' as we 
 phrase it. 
 
THEIR BELIEF IN NOAH’S FLOOD. 
 
 6i 
 
 IL 
 
 CHANGES IN THE THEORIES OF GEOLOGISTS. 
 
 H aving, thus hastily, sketched the history of 
 the science, I must impress on your atten- 
 tion one very important fact : that wherever the 
 petrifactions of extinct species of animals were 
 discovered, they were — up to the close of at least 
 the second decade of the present century — held to 
 be proofs of the historical truth of the Bible record 
 of Noah’s Flood. The words of Cuvier himself 
 are very decided : — 
 
 I am of opinion, with M. Deluc and M. Dolo- 
 mieu, that if there be any circumstance thoroughly 
 established in Geology, it is that the crust of our 
 earth has been subject to a great and sudden revo- 
 lution, the epoch of which cannot be dated much 
 further back than five or six thousand years ago. 
 This revolution has, on one hand, engulfed, and 
 
62 BUCKLAND, AND THE KIRKDALE CAVE. 
 
 caused to disappear, the countries formerly in- 
 habited by men, and the animal species at present 
 best known ; and, on the other, has laid bare the 
 bed of, the last ocean, thus converting its channel 
 into the present habitable earth.” 
 
 Our own Buckland — afterwards Dean of West- 
 minster — and Sedgwick, and the rest, held the 
 same opinion ; and held it stoutly. Buckland 
 maintained this view in his celebrated book ‘ Reli- 
 quiae Diluvianae,’ which contained an account of 
 Kirkdale cave, in Yorkshire. The cave was dis- 
 covered in the year 1821, accidentally, by some 
 stone-quarry workers. It was about two hundred 
 and fifty feet long, and the roof of it barely enabled 
 a man to stand upright. An immense quantity of 
 broken bones of the elephant, hippopotamus, rhi- 
 noceros, bison, horse, bear, and tiger, were found 
 under a thick covering of clay. There were also 
 bones of the smaller animals. The mouth of the 
 cave was so small that large animals could not 
 have lived in it. And as the fragments of their 
 bones were gnawed and channeled in a peculiar 
 manner, while the teeth and bones of hyaenas were 
 found entire. Dr. Buckland reasoned that the cave 
 
ANCIENT ACCOUNTS OF NOAH'S FLOOD. 63 
 
 had been tenanted by these creatures, which always 
 channel the bones to get at the marrow. He con- 
 cluded that they had carried to this cave parts of 
 the bodies of large animals, and the entire bodies 
 of the smaller creatures, and had been drowned in 
 their den, at the Deluge. 
 
 As I am simply sketching the history of the 
 changes in opinion among geologists, I must not 
 stay to do more than remind you that the tradition 
 of the Deluge exists in the literature of Greece and 
 Rome, as well as in that of China, and, according 
 to Sir William Jones, in the Sanscrit literature of 
 India; and that the ancient Scandinavians and 
 Egyptians had similar traditions — while the ancient 
 Mexicans and Peruvians, as well as the tribes of 
 North American Indians, and scattered islanders 
 of the Pacific, also shared them ; that the famous 
 medal of Apamea, in Phrygia, is also held to be 
 strongly confirmative of the verity of the Bible 
 account ; and that the recent discovery of a long 
 cuneiform record by the lamented George Smith, 
 of the British Museum, which must have been 
 written in ancient Assyria, 600 years before Christ, 
 has brought still stronger confirmatory testimony 
 
64 SCEPTICISM OF FRENCH GEOLOGISTS. 
 
 to the front. I say, I must not stay to do more 
 than merely mention these facts. Geological his- 
 tory demands that I next relate to you how a novel 
 theory arose among geologists. 
 
 The French geologists, with the exception of 
 Cuvier and a few others, soon began to make light 
 of the history of Noah’s Flood ; and M. Elie de 
 Beaumont boldly declared his opinion that “ not 
 one cataclysm only (the common Greek word for 
 deluge, or inundation,) had occurred in the history 
 of the earth, but thirty or forty.” In other words, 
 he contended that every successive stratum of the 
 earth, or layer of its crust, has been caused by a 
 fresh cataclysm. After some years, this theory 
 was deserted, and was somewhat scornfully styled 
 “ the Convulsionist theory.” But it received the 
 adhesion of Buckland, and Sedgwick, and Murchi- 
 son, and Phillips, and Conybeare, and almost all 
 geologists, and was held by Sir Charles Lyell up to 
 the time that he published the tenth edition of his 
 ‘Principles.’ Sir Charles also held the truth of the 
 Design Argument, and our old belief of the separate 
 creation of species up to the time of the publication 
 of that edition of his book. Sir Roderick Murchison 
 
CONVULSIONIST THEORY. 
 
 65 
 
 — long after other geologists had changed — used 
 to say, ‘‘I am a Convulsionist still ; and Dr. 
 Whewell, the great Master of Trinity College, was 
 a Convulsionist till his death. 
 
 The next change of theory was to that usually 
 called ‘ the Uniformitarian.’ This was the theory 
 of Sir Charles Lyell when he died ; and it is — or 
 was, till very lately — the prevailing opinion of all 
 living geologists. The Uniformitarian theory of 
 Geology teaches that, although the earth’s crust has 
 always been undergoing some disturbance, in one 
 part of it or another, from the action of volcanoes 
 and earthquakes — yet there has been no extremely 
 violent or complete change in it, by cataclysms ot 
 other forces. This theory affirms that the earth 
 has been going on, for many millions of years, just 
 in the way it is going on now. Rivers have carried 
 down the mud and detritus of rocks and other sub- 
 stances, and slowly formed deltas at their mouths, 
 and thus created new land. Denudations — or 
 strippings- off of one stratum from another — have 
 laid bare the under stratum : thus, it is held that 
 the chalk and greensand have been stripped off 
 from the Weald en clay, from Shakspere’s Cliff at 
 
66 
 
 UNIFORMITARIAN THEORY. 
 
 Dover to Beachy Head, in Sussex, in the lapse of 
 many thousands of years. Upheavals of one side 
 of a continent — that of Scandinavia, for instance — 
 are always slowly going on, while the other side is 
 as slowly sinking. New islands, or continents, are 
 being perpetually prepared by coralline zoophytes, 
 through long ages — and so on, for other changes. 
 But, of late, there have been some decided 
 demurrers to the Uniform itarian theory, and there 
 will be more. Nothing less than some sudden 
 and mighty dislocation of the strata, can possibly 
 account for the formation of deep valleys and 
 gorges, which are beheld in many parts of the 
 earth. 
 
WHAT IS MEANT BY ^GEOLOGY.’ 67 
 
 III. 
 
 SKETCH OF THE SCIENCE OF GEOLOGY! PRESENT 
 CLASSIFICATION OF THE LAYERS OF THE 
 
 earth's crust : formations AND STRATA : 
 THE AZOIC ROCKS. 
 
 I MAY be talking to some — perhaps, to many 
 — who have a good general knowledge of 
 Geology, and are familiar with its technicalities. 
 But, I fear, the greater number of my hearers know 
 little of what they are accustomed to call its ‘ hard 
 nameSj^and are unacquainted with its classification. 
 I address myself almost always, you know, to those 
 who need teaching, and who wish to be taught ; 
 and so I must endeavour to make it plain what 
 Geology is. The word, you all know, means 
 Discourse about the Earth, But Geology concerns 
 itself little with the inner part of the globe on 
 
68 
 
 WHAT IS THE INNER EARTH? 
 
 which we live, and deals with what we call its 
 ‘ crust,' or outer part. 
 
 “ But what about the inner part ?” you will ask : 
 ‘‘ can you not begin by telling us something about 
 that?" — and I wish I could gratify you. But the 
 various theories about the inner state of the earth 
 leave us completely in uncertainty. No one doubts 
 that there is intense heat within our globe ; and 
 many scientific men hold that by far the greater 
 space within it is filled with melted matter : matter 
 in a state of what we call ‘ white heat,’ or fusion. 
 Others think that there is considerable solidity 
 within it ; and a few eminent men of science are 
 decidedly of opinion that the very centre of the 
 earth holds matter as solid and heavy as platinum. 
 On the other hand, many judge that there are huge 
 rocky and vacant spaces in the earth, and that 
 some of these are filled with water. So, you per- 
 ceive, I cannot satisfy you as to what is the state 
 of the innermost earth. You can only hold safely 
 by the fact that it contains great heat, from the 
 fact that the lowest mines are the hottest, and 
 that there are hot springs in various parts of the 
 earth, and volcanic action. 
 
INNER CRUST, OR AZOIC ROCKS. 69 
 
 I must ask you to divide the crust of the earth, 
 in your own minds, into two parts, and to distin- 
 guish the innermost crust as Azoic, and the upper- 
 most as Zoic : the first term being applied to the 
 rocks which contain no ‘ petrifactions,^ or forms of 
 life turned into stone ; and the latter term meaning 
 the contrary. 
 
 I shall claim your attention but for a short time 
 while I describe the Azoic rocks, as they do not 
 so absorbingly fill our minds with the great pro- 
 blems of past existence on this earth, as do the 
 Zoic or Sedimentary Rocks, as they are also called. 
 
 ‘ Rock,’ I may observe, is a term somewhat 
 clumsily applied to all the earth’s layers — whether 
 clay or stone, hard or soft, by Geologists. 
 
 Granite (something grained) is held to be the 
 lowest layer of the earth’s solid crust. It is com- 
 posed of quartz (which is chiefly silica, or the 
 base of flint), felspar (which is chiefly aluminium, 
 or the base of clay), and mica a thin, scaly, and 
 shiny substance. Syenite (from Syene, a province 
 in Egypt, where it abounds,) is a variety of granite, 
 which instead of mica, contains hornblende, a 
 substance like black glass. Rocks of syenite are 
 
70 
 
 VARIETIES OF GRANITE, 
 
 found at Mount Sorrel, in Leicestershire ; common 
 granite abounds in Scotland, and in Cornwall. 
 The last-named county unfolds another and very 
 beautiful kind of granite, called Serpentine ; and 
 by the side of Arthur’s Seat, near Edinburgh, a less 
 beautiful kind abounds, called Porphyry, (from the 
 Greek word for purple). 
 
 I must next mention what are often called the 
 Trap rocks, and sometimes Greenstone or Whin- 
 stone, and Basalt. The Greenstone rocks often 
 are found to consist of mere veins of stone shot 
 up, doubtless, in the fused or lava state, from 
 beneath the granite, and penetrating their way for 
 n;iles to the upper crust of the earth. At other 
 times Greenstone or Whinstone is found in huge 
 masses, as in the Cheviot Hills. It is believed 
 that the melted matter, originally, was shot up 
 beneath the sea, because it is so dense : the lava 
 from our volcanoes — called pumice-stone — is light, 
 from having been shot up into the air. 
 
 Basalt must also have been shot up from the 
 earth’s interior in a fused state. It is a remarkable 
 substance — being columnar in form, and the 
 columns being in jointed pieces, and of geometrical 
 
AND OF TRAP ROCKS. 
 
 n 
 
 shape. The famous ‘ Fingal’s Cave/ in the isle 
 of Staffa, and the ‘Giant’s Causeway/ on the 
 northern coast of Ireland, afford grand specimens 
 of Basaltic formations. Columnar Basalt is also 
 seen in the volcano of Hecla, in Iceland. 
 
 I have said that granite is held to be the lowest 
 layer of the Earth’s crust — but there is also a 
 belief among scientific men, that granite is con- 
 stantly being formed by chemical agencies : a 
 theory into which we have not time to enter, 
 
 now. 
 
72 
 
 OUTER CRUST OF THE EARTH, 
 
 IV, 
 
 CLASSIFICATION OF THE ZOIC, OR SEDIMENTARY 
 ROCKS, OR LAYERS OF THE EARTH’s CRUST WHICH 
 CONTAIN PETRIFACTIONS AND MARKS OF EXTINCT 
 VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE. 
 
 HE sedimentary rocks, or upper layers of the 
 
 JL Earth’s crust, are held to be about thirty-two 
 miles in thickness. Thirty-two miles ! ** some 
 of you may be ready to exclaim ; do you mean 
 that any man, or company of men, have ever dug 
 down into the earth to such a depth? ’* The answer 
 will be, No; perhaps two miles may be considered 
 the limit of the depth to which men have ever 
 ‘sunk' or bored into the earth. But you will 
 soon understand how the thirty-two miles have 
 been measured. If you placed a number of books 
 one upon another on their flat sides, and put them 
 on a table, you could not learn the contents of the 
 
DIVIDED INTO THREE ‘FORMATIONS.' 
 
 73 
 
 book at the bottom until you had released it from 
 its position. But if you placed the books on the 
 shelves of a library, you could easily know what 
 was inside any of the books. So, while the rocks 
 lie one on another, to a great depth, you cannot 
 measure them. But if they be thrown down beside 
 each other, you can learn their size. Now, you 
 will often see this bouleversetnent , as the French call 
 it — this tilted-up condition of the Earth's strata — if 
 you be industrious enough to observe the appear- 
 ance of the cuttings as you travel along a railway. 
 It is because the layers of the Earth's crust have 
 been thrown up and broken by interior forces, that 
 it becomes possible to measure the layers. 
 
 You will, perhaps, feel surprised when I tell you 
 how unequally the sedimentary rocks have been 
 divided into three great ‘ Formations,’ called the 
 Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary — or Palaeozoic, 
 Mesozoic, and Kainozoic formations. The Primary, 
 or Palaeozoic formation, consists of about twenty- 
 six miles of strata out of the thirty-two that I 
 have just mentioned ; the Secondary, or Mesozoic 
 formation, consists of about three miles and one- 
 
 third of a mile ; while the Tertiary, or Kainozoic, 
 6 
 
74 REASONS FOR V’flE THREE DIVISIONS. 
 
 consists of about two miles and two-thirds of a 
 mile. 
 
 Did geologists get any hint from any very 
 ancient book, or tradition, to guide them in thus 
 dividing the Earth's strata?*' some of you may 
 ask. The answer is, most positively y No ; and be 
 pleased to remember it. The classification of three 
 formations was forced upon their minds by what 
 they have called the unconformity of the three 
 formations. When they observed the evidences of 
 some mighty breaking up, contortion, and twisting 
 and upheaval of the strata between the Palaeozoic 
 and the Mesozoic, and, again, between the Mesozoic 
 and the Kainozoic, and still more when they con- 
 templated the evidences of almost entirely different 
 kind of life in the Palaeozoic as compared with the 
 Mesozoic, — and also, in the Mesozoic as compared 
 with the Kainozoic, this division into three forma- 
 tions was forced upon them, and was unavoidably 
 adopted. 
 
THE METAMORPHIC ROCKS. 
 
 75 
 
 V. 
 
 THE PRIMARY, OR PALAEOZOIC FORMATION I ORDER 
 OF POSITION OF ITS LAYERS OR STRATA ; AND 
 BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THEM. 
 
 AL^OZOIC,' be it observed, means re~ 
 
 -L lating to ancient life ; and the lowest forma- 
 tion of the sedimentary rocks is so called because 
 it contains marks and petrifactions of what are 
 considered to have been the most early life-forms 
 on this globe. Let us begin at the beginning — at 
 the lowermost part of the formation. Resting on 
 the granite, we come first on an immense mass ot 
 rocks, about sixteen miles in thickness, which for 
 some time bore the unsettled titles of Metamorphic 
 rocks, and Transition rocks, and Grauwacke and 
 Gneiss, and other questionables. Sir Roderic 
 Murchison devoted himself to a study of these 
 rocks, and soon published his book entitled 
 
75 THE EOZOIC AND SILURIAN ROCK. 
 
 ‘ Siluria * — giving the name of Silurian rocks to 
 the slates and limestones and flags and grits and 
 sandstones of Shropshire and the parts of Wales 
 adjoining that county— which were, ages ago, in- 
 habited by the Silures. Professor Sedgwick also 
 diligently examined these rocks, and insisted on 
 giving the name of Cambrian (from Cambria, the 
 ancient name of Wales) to the lower and denser of 
 them. The division, however, has not rested there 
 — for the term Lau 7 'entian has recently been given 
 to the very lowermost and hardest of these rocks, 
 by Sir William Logan. The name is derived from 
 the river St. Lawrence in Canada, for it is on the 
 banks of that river that gneiss^ as this hardest of 
 rocks used to be called, most abounds. It is also 
 common to some of our Hebrides, or Western 
 Islands of Scotland. The order of position, thus 
 far, will be — beginning from the bottom : i. Lau- 
 rentian; 2. Cambrian; and 3. Silurian rocks. 
 
 4 and 5. We next come upon a double layer of 
 the Sedimentary rocks, which were formerly classed 
 as single, being called ‘ the Devonian, or Old Red 
 Sandstone.’ They are now called the Devonian, 
 and Old Red Sandstone. And whoever has walked 
 
THE DEVONIAN AND OLD RED. 
 
 77 
 
 along the foot-pavement of Plymouth or Devonport 
 in a shower of rain, and marked the beauty of the 
 variegated limestone slabs — which the natives fondly 
 call ‘ Devonshire marble,’ — will agree at once 
 that they ought to receive a different nomenclature 
 from the coarse red rocks of Herefordshire. Yet 
 the ‘ Old Red ’ is not always of the same colour. 
 In Forfarshire, it is a mottled dark gray, and is 
 very extensively used for slabs of footways — while 
 in Morayshire it is of a fine yellow brown, almost 
 approaching to cream-colour, and gives a beauty of 
 a peculiar kind to the newer part of the ancient, 
 cathedralled city of Elgin. 
 
 6. The Mountain Limestone lies above the Old 
 Red. It takes the name of Yoredale rocks, in the 
 north of Yorkshire, from the river Yore. It is 
 usual to call the Mountain Limestone the beginning 
 of the Carboniferous, or Coal-bearing strata — for it 
 is often intersected by coal. 
 
 7. The Millstone Grit — so abundant and so well 
 known in Yorkshire, usually lies above the Moun- 
 tain Limestone ; but the Yoredale rocks often pass 
 into it without any ‘unconformity,’ in geological 
 phrase ; and often, it is also intersected by coal. 
 
78 THE ENGLISH COAL MEASURES, 
 
 8. The coal measures — to us, the most important 
 strata of the Palaeozoic formation — come next. 
 We have one seam of coal, in England, which is 
 thirty feet in thickness. It is beneath the * Black 
 Country,’ between Dudley and Wolverhampton, 
 and is the property of the Earl of Dudley, the 
 great ‘ coal king,’ as the colliers call him. But 
 our British coal seams are commonly from five to 
 ten feet in thickness ; and some seams are worked 
 which are less than three feet — the poor collier 
 having to toil on for hours, in a cramped-up 
 posture, with his ‘ pick,’ or sharp hammer, by the 
 dim light of his Davy lamp, to procure for us this 
 great requisite for our daily comfort and use. 
 
 Between the seams of coal, slaty and clayey 
 shales, and thin layers of limestone and sandstone, 
 are often found ; the most valuable substance, how- 
 ever, which is mixed up with the coal seams is 
 iron ore. It is found in abundance in all our coal 
 districts : in Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Dur- 
 ham, and in Staffordshire ; and also in Wales and 
 Scotland. 
 
 9. The Permian (so called from Perm, a pro- 
 vince of Russia, where it abounds) or Magnesian 
 
AND THE MAGNESIAN LIMESTONE. 
 
 79 
 
 Limestone, forms the uppermost stratum of the 
 Palaeozoic formation. It is found in Nottingham- 
 shire — where it has been quarried to build the 
 new Houses of Parliament. It extends in a thin 
 line through Yorkshire ; and extends over a small 
 part of East Derbyshire, and over a larger part of 
 Durham : at Sunderland, in that county, it often 
 takes the name of Dolomite — a stone exhibiting 
 a variety of whimsical forms^ — at which we need 
 not wonder, for the language of Dr. Dawson, in 
 his ‘ Story of the Earth ’ is — “ Then came on that 
 strange and terrible Permian period, which, like 
 the more modern boulder-formation, marked the 
 death of one age and the birth of another,” 
 
8o FINDING OF THE ‘ EOZOON CANADENSE.^ 
 
 VL 
 
 PETRIFACTIONS — OR, EXTINCT LIFE-FORMS TURNED 
 INTO STONE — FOUND IN THE PRIMARY OR 
 PALAEOZOIC FORMATION. 
 
 E will, to relieve ourselves of anything like 
 
 ^ » too much dry detail at once, reserve a 
 description of the strata in the other two formations 
 until we have glanced at the petrified life-forms in 
 the Palaeozoic. 
 
 Limestone has been found intersecting gneiss 
 or Laurentian stratum, and in it has recently been 
 found what is considered to be the earliest of all 
 forms of life. Sir William Logan discovered it, and 
 Principal Dawson, Dr. Carpenter, and others, have 
 endorsed the reality of the discovery, to which 
 Principal Dawson has given the name of ‘ Eozoon 
 Canadense,^ or Canadian early-living creature. It 
 belongs to the Rhizopods, or root-footed creatuy^es — 
 
THE TRILOBITE, AND ITS EYES. 8 1 
 
 microscopic existences belonging to the Foramini- 
 fera, of which millions are still found at the bottom 
 of the Atlantic. It was, it may be therefore con- 
 cluded, a form of sea-life. 
 
 I must not stop to describe to you the Molluscs — 
 the Brachiopods and Echinoderms, or the early 
 forms of sponges, which have been traced in the 
 Cambrian stratum. I must pass on to one im- 
 portant form, first found in the Cambrian, and 
 becoming extinct in the Carboniferous strata. This 
 was the Trilobite, or three-lobed creature. It re- 
 sembled three small shields joined together, was 
 composed of joints, so that it could curl itself up, 
 and had two eyes. Some of the Trilobites were 
 very small, and some from one to two feet long. 
 From the abundance of their petrifactions, it is 
 concluded that they existed in millions, and were 
 the scavengers and master-creatures of the ancient 
 seas, before the creation of fishes, for they are 
 found most numerously in the middle of the Silurian 
 stratum. 
 
 Let me draw your particular attention to the 
 eyes of the Trilobite. Each of these eyes had font 
 hundred facets. ‘ Facet ^ (ox lit fi( face) you have in 
 
82 
 
 THE DUKE, AND THE QUEEN. 
 
 the diamond when it has been cut. The famous 
 Koh-i-Nur, or mouniain of lights as it means, in 
 Arabic, the priceless diamond which was won in 
 India, and presented to Queen Victoria when she 
 was young, is said to have been so dull — mag- 
 nificent as the stone was in size — that it did not 
 seem to deserve the Arabic name. The story runs 
 that the ‘ Iron Duke ’ said to the Queen, “ Your 
 Majesty should have it cut into facets.^' ‘‘ I will 
 commit it to your care, if your Grace will undertake 
 to see it done,” said the Queen. And, at once, 
 Wellington received it, and wrapped it in his silk 
 handkerchief. He took it to the lapidary, watched 
 him working, the first time, and then took posses- 
 sion of it again. Thus he watched the lapidary, day 
 by day, always taking the diamond back into his 
 own care, — always ‘ the soldier of duty,’ you see, — 
 and safely gave it back into the Queen’s hands. 
 Now, when she places it on her brow, it dazzles the 
 eyes of beholders. 
 
 Some of you who thinks will be asking, Why 
 had these creatures this remarkable provision?” 
 Perhaps, that no minute object, on any side, might- 
 escape their vision in the water. Or there mav 
 
A REASON FOR MANY EYES. 
 
 83 
 
 have been reasons for such a provision that we 
 cannot penetrate. Our common dragon-fly has 
 7000 such facets, or lenses, in each eye ; and there 
 is one kind of butterfly which has 35,000 lenses in 
 its two eyes. ‘‘What is it for?” is the natural 
 question which is sure to arise in every thoughtful 
 mind, when such information is given to it. But 
 how often we cannot devise the answer to our 
 questions ! I have a little theory of my own about 
 the lenses in the eyes of our beautiful insects. 
 Why should not you and I have our theories, as 
 well as Mr. Darwin ? My theory may be worth- 
 less — but it pleases me, and so I’ll tell it you. 
 
 “God is love.” And His love may be mani- 
 fested to what we deem the meanest of His crea- 
 tures, in many ways that we cannot discern, in our 
 present state. As the multitude of lenses present 
 objects to the insects in every possible direction, 
 and it may be of every possible dimension, how- 
 ever minute, they may also present the rays of 
 light in every possible variety of colour ; and God 
 may have given to these beautiful creatures, which 
 are clothed with rich and varied colours, and fre- 
 quent the flowers which His glorious hand has also 
 
84 the enjoyment of colours. 
 
 clothed with every rich and varied colour, a rapture 
 in the enjoyment of colour which is unknown and 
 inexperienced by ourselves. How we dhfer in our 
 perception of colour, and in its enjoyment! Some 
 are ‘colour blind,’ like John Dalton, the great 
 chemist, who would have it that a red and a green 
 handkerchief were of the same colour. What eyes 
 for colour, on the other hand, must have been the 
 eyes of Titian, and Giorgione, and Rubens 1 
 
 I do not know how many of you share my feel- 
 ing, but I can’t help saying to you that I never 
 enter one of our old cathedrals and gaze on the 
 glorious azure and gorgeous vermilion of some of 
 the old windows without a delight that is inexpres- 
 sible. Do not you all enjoy the beauty of flowers? 
 A simple marigold, with its glowing orange petals 
 and sweet green leaves, is a sight I never see in 
 spring without a throb of joy. It is recorded of 
 Linnaeus, ^that when he first saw afield of the golden 
 gorse in full flower, he fell on his knees, and, with 
 tears, thanked God for creating such a glorious 
 sight for man. I think I experienced a kindred 
 feeling when I saw a flower which I never saw but 
 once in my life. It was a costly flower, growing 
 
GOD, THE GREAT OPTICIAN. 85 
 
 in the collection of one who loves God’s beautiful 
 flowers — Mr. Thomas Coats, the philanthropic 
 manufacturer of Paisley. The flower was the 
 Vanda carulea of the Himalaya mountains; and it 
 is said to be the grandest orchid in the world. 
 
 Dean Buckland’s intelligent remark, in his 
 Bridgewater Treatise, should not be forgotten. — 
 If an Egyptian mummy, when opened, were found 
 to have a telescope or microscope in its hand, 
 should we not say, The Egyptians understood 
 optics”? — and can we examine the eyes of the 
 Trilobite, which geologists afflrm existed millions 
 of years ago, and deny that the Almighty and All- 
 wise Optician did not then exist? 
 
 One more observation about the Trilobites, and 
 we leave them. Geologists have found no mark 
 of a living form from which to argue that they were 
 evolved ; and they disappear, in the Carboniferous 
 series, without leaving any mark of offspring, or 
 evolved successors. They are found as having 
 existed during one early period ; and they are never 
 found afterwards. A fact of the strongest kind in 
 disproof of Evolution. 
 
 Nor is the existence of the Ganoid fishes, as 
 
86 
 
 GANOID FISHES FOUND, FIRST. 
 
 the earliest found, a less powerful fact disr'-oving 
 the theory of Evolution. Agassiz, the Kdlliant 
 pupil of Cuvier, delighted his teacher by suggest- 
 ing a most simple and sensible arrangement of the 
 fishes into four classes : i. Ganoid (fvom.ganos, the 
 Greek word for splendour,) or armed fishes, such 
 as the sturgeon ; 2. Placoid fishes, or fishes with 
 thick rough coverings, like the shark; 3. Ctenoid 
 fishes, whose scales have edges resembling the 
 teeth of a comb ; and, 4. Cycloid fishes, whose 
 scales are circular. Now, Ganoid fishes are most 
 abundant in the Palaeozoic formation ; are fewer 
 in the Mesozoic and Kainozoic ; and we have not 
 now more than nine species of them. The 
 lamented Hugh Miller first discovered petrifaction? 
 of them in the Old Red ; but they have since been 
 found in the Ludlow limestone and other Palaeozoic 
 rocks, as I have already said, abundantly. The 
 Ganoids are the earliest found petrifactions of 
 fishes. Geologists have urged that simpler forms 
 of fishes will be found, perhaps^ even in the lower 
 rocks. But none have been founds — a fact very un- 
 favourable to the theory of Evolution. 
 
 The Placoid fishes were also numerous during 
 
THE CRINOIDS, OR SEA LILIES. 
 
 87 
 
 the Palaeozoic period, together with large Crusta- 
 ceans, resembling the king-crabs of the West 
 Indies ; and many petrifactions of insects allied to 
 our beetles, cockroaches, ants, centipedes, and 
 scorpions, are found in these early rocks. I must 
 not describe them at length. Let me, however, 
 invite your attention for a few moments to what 
 are called Crinoids, or sea- lilies, one of the most 
 remarkable forms of life during the Palaeozoic 
 period. Some of the beds of mountain limestone, 
 some hundreds of feet in thickness, are almost 
 entirely composed of the broken skeletons of these 
 crinoids. They must have been abundant in the 
 early seas. A creature of very simple organisation, 
 resembling a portion of sea-jelly, was gifted by the 
 Almighty Maker with the instinct of collecting, or 
 abstracting, lime from the sea-water, and forming 
 therewith a geometrically-shaped piece of stone, 
 and rooting it in the bottom of the sea. On this 
 it proceeded to form and lay another piece of lime- 
 stone, and on this another, and so on, till it had 
 raised a tall stone column, with each joint of which 
 it kept up communication by means of two bundles 
 of fibres piercing the centre of the flexible pillar. 
 
88 
 
 LESSONS OF PATIENCE, FOR US. 
 
 The creature then branched off in its workman- 
 ship into a number of stone arms of similar work- 
 manship, and thus formed a figure like the cup of 
 c lily. The Briarean Pentacrinite — one of these 
 strange zoophytes — was composed of 1 50,000 pieces 
 of limestone, and was held together by 300,000 
 bundles of fibres ! 
 
 “What did God form such strange creatures 
 for?” “Why did He make them?” are natural 
 questions which must arise in a mind which has 
 any capability of thinking. But your lecturer can- 
 not answer these questions ; and he knows no 
 mortal man, nor has he ever heard of one, who 
 had the ability to answer them. There must be 
 purpose, even when we cannot trace it, in every 
 part of God^s work. He never works by caprice. 
 How many thousands of things there are around 
 us, how many evident marks of skill and fitness, 
 which thus set us fast ! Ought we to be surprised 
 at this ? Can we expect, with our imperfect facul- 
 ties, to comprehend all around us? Do we not 
 know that we comprehend nothing? Let us have 
 a little patience. In the higher state which Christ 
 has promised to us — where we shall know as we 
 
ANCIENT PLANTS BECOME COAL. 
 
 89 
 
 are knoum^ — I, for one, confide that many natural 
 mysteries which puzzle us now, will be made plain 
 to us. 
 
 The vegetable life of the Palaeozoic formation is 
 of higher moment to us than even the mysterious 
 and strange forms of animal life to which we have 
 paid brief attention. Algae, or sea-weeds, and 
 other simple vegetable forms, we pass by, to note 
 the plants of gigantic growth which, by the com- 
 bined influences of moisture, heat, pressure, and 
 other, as yet, unknown causes, operating through 
 long ages, have been transformed into coal — the 
 kind of fuel which has become such a desideratum 
 in our modern civilisation. These plants were not 
 what we commonly name and value as ‘flowers.^ 
 They were lower forms of vegetation : horse-tails, 
 club-mosses, ferns : conifers, or cone-bearing trees, 
 were the highest forms among them. 
 
 The earth in its hot, steamy state, before the 
 formation of the sun, threw up these lower forms 
 of vegetation into monstrous growths. Nearly 
 two hundred species of fossil ferns, some more 
 than thirty feet high, chiefly polypodies, have been 
 discovered in coal-seams and the shale that sepa- 
 7 
 
90 COAL, IRON, AND LIME, TOGETHER, 
 
 rates them : horse-tails arranged into a new genus 
 called Calamites^ of great height, and some a foot 
 in diameter ; and two genera of Ly copods ^ or club 
 mosses, named Lepidodendrons and Sigillaria^ some 
 of them fifty feet high and three or four feet thick 
 in the stalk. 
 
 The coal-seams stretch across Europe, from east 
 to west ; are believed to extend beneath the bed of 
 the Atlantic; and are spread over North America 
 to the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. The 
 lamented Hugh Miller observes that if our earth 
 could have been seen by the inhabitants of another 
 planet during the Carboniferous period of the 
 Palaeozoic formation, it must have seemed to be of 
 a perennial green colour, from the abundance of its 
 growth of vegetation. 
 
 A believer in Mr. Darwin’s theory will see no 
 proof of a Divine Providence in the existence of 
 coal-seams in such abundance. But we who 
 believe in such a Providence see it proven in the 
 existence of iron ore amidst the coal ; in the pre- 
 sence of mountain limestone, too — for lime is neces- 
 sary as the ‘ flux ’ without which the furnace-work 
 could not go on ; and also in the disturbing forces 
 
PROOFS OF god’s BENEFICENCE. 91 
 
 which raised the coal, and broke it into ^ faults,^ 
 thus inclining it for convenient reach and working 
 by man — the crown of earth’s creation whom God 
 had in His beneficent view and regard, while pre- 
 paring the earth for him. 
 
 It is supposed that these vast growths of vege- 
 tation subsided, or sank, again and again; that the 
 swamps, where they grew, were silted up, and 
 another growth succeeded ; and that this process 
 went on for long ages, until the numerous seams 
 were formed. The roots of the sigillaria are often 
 found in one seam, or in the shale, and run up 
 into the seam above, or into tue shale above that. 
 Geologists reckon that the Carboniferous period 
 must have lasted more than a million of years. 
 
92 
 
 PASSAGE TO THE MESOZOIC# 
 
 VII, 
 
 THE SECONDARY, OR MESOZOIC FORMATION: ORDER 
 OF POSITION, AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF ITS 
 LAYERS, OR STRATA. 
 
 ‘ 1\ /T ESOZOIC ’ points out the petrifactions of 
 1 VX what is considered to be the middle period 
 life of the earth. One cannot help wondering that 
 the Mesozoic is not considered as beginning with 
 the Magnesian limestone. The marks of ‘ uncon- 
 formity ’ of which I have before spoken, and which, 
 we are told, led geologists to make their divisions, 
 first, of a great threefold character, begin during 
 the latter part of the Carboniferous period. The 
 Permian or Magnesian limestone lies immediately 
 “ over the bent and denuded edges and surfaces of 
 the Carboniferous strata — a proof that great dis- 
 turbing forces must have been in operation before 
 the Magnesian limestone was deposited. The fact 
 
LARGE SURFACE OF THE NEW RED. 
 
 93 
 
 that few life-forms of animals found in the Permian 
 are found in the Mesozoic seems chiefly to have 
 determined the present order of classification. 
 
 The contents of the secondary formation are 
 usually distributed, first, into groups of rocks: 
 the driassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous groups: 
 Triassic, meaning threefold ; Jurassic, from Mount 
 Jura in Switzerland, because the kind of rocks 
 signified abound there ; and Cretaceous, from creta^ 
 or chalk. The Triassic is again divided thrice : 
 Bunter Sandstein^ Muschelkalk^ and Keuper Sandsiein^ 
 the second-named not being found in England, but 
 abounding in Germany. The Bunter and Keuper 
 Sandsteins form, together, what is called — 
 
 I . The New Red Sandstone, which covers a large 
 surface in several counties of England. If you 
 plape your forefingers at the upper part of the map 
 of England — say, one in Cumberland, and the other 
 about the mouth of the Wear. — then gradually bring 
 your fingers down into the Midlands, and then 
 pass downwards on the western side of England 
 into the heart of Devon, you will mark out the 
 large district over which extends either the Upper 
 and Lower New Red, or the ‘Variegated Marls* 
 
94 
 
 LIAS, SUCCEEDS THE NEW RED. 
 
 which pertain to it, and which abound in gypsum. 
 The Keuper (copper) or Upper New Red is noted 
 for its salt-springs : it is thought that salt lakes 
 abound under it. 
 
 Dean Buckland observes that some of the best 
 known towns in England stand on the New Red : 
 Carlisle and York, Preston and Warrington, Liver- 
 pool and Manchester, Chester and Shrewsbury, 
 Nantwich and Droitwich, Lichfield and Coventry, 
 Stafford and Wolverhampton, Derby, Nottingham 
 and Leicester, Worcester, Bristol and Exeter. 
 
 2. The Lias forms the lowermost part of the 
 Jurassic rocks. It extends from the north of York- 
 shire, in a belt lying south-west, to Dorsetshire. It 
 is remarkable as a series of beds for its evenness, 
 and its generally undisturbed horizontal position. 
 Lias slabs are often used for footways, and great 
 quantities of Lias are burnt for use as lime. Iron 
 ore is found in immense masses in the Cleveland 
 hills of Yorkshire, and in a part of Northants, and 
 also near Banbury : all in the Lias division. 
 
 3. The Oolite (from oon^ an egg, and lithos^ 
 stone) is another division of the Jurassic. It con- 
 sists of stones of varied character. Some are firm 
 
THE OOLITE AND THE GREENSAND. 
 
 95 
 
 in texture, and are fine building stones; while the 
 ‘fuller’s earth’ is soft, and the Bath stone is 
 adapted for carving, and is considered equal to Caen 
 stone for ornamental purposes. The Stonesfield 
 slate is also among the Oolites, and the Cornbrash 
 and Forest marble of the west of England. The 
 ‘ Oxford Clay ’ stretches over a considerable part 
 of England, from Weymouth to Scarborough, and 
 underlies the boggy surface of the fens, in the 
 counties of Huntingdon, Cambridge, and Lincoln. 
 The Portland stone of which St. Paul’s, and Somer- 
 set House, and many of Wren’s churches are 
 built, and which is so extensively used in the south 
 of England for flagging footways, also belongs to 
 the Oolite, as also do the Purbeck stone, the 
 Wealden clay, and the Hastings sand. 
 
 4. The Greensand forms the lowermost layer of 
 what is called the Cretaceous group. “ Can any 
 sand be green?'’ some one may ask. If you see 
 it near Reigate, it is of the most varied colours. 
 But the greensand is commonly anything but green. 
 It resembles, rather, lumps of cinders thrown out of 
 a furnace, for it abounds with iron. The palisades 
 of St. Paul’s were made from iron obtained from 
 
96 
 
 THE THREEFOLD CHALK STRATA. 
 
 ^he greensand of Sussex ; — or, as it is now affirmed, 
 from the Weald Clay, beneath the greensand. The 
 iron ore was fused with charcoal : coal not being 
 at hand. The Gault — a heavy dark-coloured marl 
 or clay — is found among the greensand. 
 
 5. The Chalk, properly so called, is in three 
 layers : the lowermost layer is of a greenish cast, 
 and hard ; the middle layer is of a grey hue, and is 
 also hard : it is the subsoil of the Lincolnshire and 
 Yorkshire wolds ; the uppermost layer is the white 
 and soft chalk which is converted into whiting: 
 this is the layer which abounds in rows of flint 
 nodules, and which many of you, no doubt, have 
 observed in some railway cuttings. The flints were 
 sponges, in the ancient seas. The sponges — the 
 soft sponges which we daily use — are chiefly silex^ 
 or flint. In the stalks of flowers and of corn flint 
 abounds. God can use what seems to us to be the 
 most unlikely and stubborn of all materials to form 
 the most delicate and tender of His patterns of 
 workmanship. 
 
AMMONITFS OF THK MESOZOIC* 
 
 97 
 
 VIII 
 
 PETRIFACTIONS FOUND IN THE SECONDARY OR 
 MESOZOIC FORMATION. 
 
 HE chief petrified vegetable forms found in 
 
 ^ the Secondary Formation, are Conifers and 
 Cycads : in form, the last-named resembled a pinC' 
 apple in full growth, — but you must picture to 
 yourself a form resembling a pineapple of very 
 considerable size. 
 
 Ammonites are the most peculiar animal form 
 of petrifaction found in the Mesozoic, and they are 
 peculiar to it, being never found in the Palaeozoic 
 or Kainozoic formations. You know them well, 
 many of you, no doubt, as resembling a snake 
 coiled up and turned into stone. Some are 
 small, many of them large : the largest have been 
 found in the Isle of Portland — being nearly five 
 feet in diameter. These ‘ chambered ^ forms were 
 
98 FISHES OF THE MESOZOIC. 
 
 tenanted by molluscs living in the sea. The Ortho- 
 ceras, a form resembling the Ammonite, existed only 
 in the Palaeozoic : the Nautilus, which is also a 
 relative of the Ammonite, is found in the recent 
 period. 
 
 There is an abundance of fishes found among 
 the petrifactions of the Mesozoic, and they are 
 now found with the form of tail common to 
 most of our living fishes — the ^ homocercal,’ in 
 which the fins are attached to the end of the 
 vertebra. In the Ganoid and Placoid fishes of the 
 Palaeozoic, the tail was what is termed ‘ hetero- 
 cercal ' — the fins being attached only to the upper 
 part of the vertebra, at its end ; the sturgeon and 
 the shark, of our day, have this ancient form of 
 tail. 
 
 Crinoids, star-fishes, belemnites (a creature 
 allied to the cuttle-fish), corallines, oysters, and 
 other low animal forms, belonged also to the 
 Secondary formation — with numerous insects ; and 
 in 1862 the earliest fossil bird was discovered in 
 it. In America, they profess to have found foot- 
 prints of birds of immense size in the New Red; 
 
THE HUGE ICHTHYOSAURUS. 
 
 99 
 
 but it is questionable whether they are not the 
 marks of reptiles. 
 
 For this was the great period of reptile life. 
 The Lias stratum abounds with petrifactions of 
 huge saurians. The Ichthyosaurus will be a figure 
 you have often seen represented in books. It was, 
 as its name denotes, a fish-lizard, — a terrible in- 
 habitant of ancient seas. It was thirty feet long, 
 and had one hundred joints in its vertebra, moved 
 by four huge paddles, — had eyes each as large as a 
 man's head, and in its jaws, which were six feet 
 in length, were two hundred conical teeth. The 
 eyes were not horny, like the eyes of the trilobite, 
 and therefore they are not preserved in the petri- 
 faction. But round the large cavities of the eye- 
 sockets are circular appendages of bone which 
 could be drawn out — one over the other — so as to 
 give the eyes a telescopic power, and enable this 
 huge creature to see afar off, or into the depths of 
 the sea, — or, the large eyes might be lamps of light, 
 and enable it to see in darkness. The bony 
 appendages round the eye are a similar provision 
 to that of the large birds of prey living in our own 
 time, — birds which have no sense of smell, but arc 
 
lOO 
 
 GOD, THE GREAT MECHANICIAN. 
 
 thus able to see the dead carcase of a horse or an 
 ox, at the distance of several miles, — birds such as 
 the condor, in South America. 
 
 While the eyes of both extinct and living crea- 
 tures thus lead us again to think of God as the 
 Almighty and All-wise Optician, the jaws of the 
 Ichthyosaurus compel us to regard Him as the 
 sovereign Mechanician. For ready seizing of its 
 prey, thick and clumsily-formed jaws would not 
 have helped this destructive creature. So the jaws 
 are slender. But, slender jaws, six feet in length, 
 would have been likely to snap asunder while the 
 animal was seizing some strong crustacean. Did 
 you ever note the springs of a railway carriage or 
 engine, or coach-springs ? The Ichthyosaurus has 
 three bones constructed on the principle of such 
 springs, on each side of the under-jaw, to give it 
 the elastic force of a spring, and prevent it from 
 breaking. 
 
 Thus God stores His creation, both in the past 
 and in the present, with what we call ‘ design and 
 contrivance.’ ‘‘ Is it not a proof of weakness in 
 God,” I once heard a sceptical advocate say, 
 
 that He had to design and contrive in order to 
 
GOD, THE GREAT GEOMETRICIAN. 
 
 lOI 
 
 make things ? The question seemed to me to be 
 no proof of the man’s ingenuity, but only of his 
 perversity. A moment’s real reflection would have 
 taught him that an Almighty and All-wise Being 
 has not to think and think on, in order to design 
 and contrive — like man with his limited intelligence; 
 but that the Almighty and All-wise One stores His 
 creation with these signs of design and contrivance 
 to lead us to the perception of His wisdom and 
 power. It is thus that the invisible things of 
 Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly 
 seen, being understood by the things which are 
 made : even His eternal power and Godhead.” 
 
 Plato calls God the Great Geometrician or 
 Mathematician. And who that marks the order, 
 the symmetry, the shapeableness, the delicacy and 
 perfection of adjustment, the exquisite exactness of 
 fittings together of parts, and the unspeakable 
 beauty of finish, in the works of the Almighty and 
 All- wise Architect of this universe can fail to ac- 
 knowledge the just and true application of the 
 terms used by the great Athenian philosopher? 
 
 But you forget that you raise another troublous 
 thought in our minds by describing this ancient 
 
102 
 
 SYSTEM OF PREY, A MYSTERY. 
 
 destructive fish-lizard,^’ says another: ‘‘why did 
 God compose His creation of animals to destroy 
 and animals to be destroyed?”- I wish 1 could 
 answer your question fully. But I can only give 
 the partial replies to it that I have often given in 
 your hearing and in the hearing of others, and I 
 need not repeat them here. I wait — with you who 
 share my Christian hope and trust — to have the 
 full solution of the difficulty when, having been un- 
 clothed, we shall be clothed upon with immortality, 
 in the heaven Christ has promised to us. I will 
 only say that, with regard to our present life, I 
 never shared the gloomy thoughts of John Stuart 
 Mill. The sum of the happiness of God’s earthly 
 creation is, to my mind, unmeasurably over and 
 above the quantum of suffering there is in it. 
 
 1 must refer you to Sir Charles Lyell’s, or other 
 geological treatises, for descriptions of other 
 gigantic fish-lizards of the Mesozoic period — the 
 Megalosaurus^ Teleosaurics, Ste7ieosaurus^ and Plio~ 
 saurus ; the Mosasaurus, which was fifty feet long ; 
 the Plesiosaurus^ with its enormous long neck, in 
 which' were thirty-three vertebrae ; and, above all, 
 the Ceieosaurus (or whale-like lizard), which was 
 
WONDERS OF THE CHALK. 
 
 103 
 
 seventy feet long, and of which Professor Phillips 
 placed a grand petrifaction in the Oxford Museum. 
 Dr. Dawson says that it must have been a land 
 animal. Perhaps the strangest creature of all was 
 the Pterodactyl — a flying animal with a head and 
 beak like a bird, yet with sixty conical teeth, 
 immense eyes which are supposed to have enabled 
 it to see and fly by night, and huge wings that must 
 have been membranous. 
 
 A word or two respecting the great Chalk strata. 
 The dredgings in the Atlantic, by the naturalists 
 who went out in the ship ‘ Challenger,’ have 
 recently shown that the bottom of the ocean is 
 covered to a very great depth with chalky mud, 
 formed chiefly of microscopical shells of Globigerina^ 
 and other genera of what are called Foraininifera^ 
 which, we know, also swarmed in the seas of the 
 Cretaceous period. White chalk is carbonate o^ 
 lime, and is chiefly made up of the fragments of 
 minute shells — the coverings of Foraminifera, 
 chiefly of the genus Globigerina, Some of our 
 chalk beds are over a thousand feet, it is said, in 
 thickness. What an idea of the creation of God 
 
t04 
 
 CHALK, AND GREAT SUBSIDENCE. 
 
 is presented to us by such an account ! The 
 thought of the incalculable millions of li\es ol 
 minute creatures, and of their being succeeded, 
 again and again, by still more incalculable millions, 
 in past ages, seems to make us stagger and reel in 
 attempting to form an adequate idea of the Creator's 
 power and its boundlessness. 
 
 Geologists say that there was a slow subsi- 
 dence of a large part of the earth’s surface, at the 
 beginning of the Cretaceous period; and, then, 
 a ‘crumpling of the crust,' and elevation of the 
 highest mountain ranges — the Himalayas, the 
 Andes, and the Alps, in the Tertiary, or Kainozoic 
 period, that followed. 
 
ANOTHER GREAT ‘ UNCON FORMITY/ 
 
 105 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE TERTIARY OR KAINOZOIC FORMATION : ORDER 
 OF POSITION, AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF ITS 
 LAYERS, OR STRATA. 
 
 ‘ 7^ AINOZOIC^ denotes the petrifactions of 
 A V newer period-life. Again, I must remind 
 you of the ‘ unconformity ^ which led men of science 
 to separate the Mesozoic from the Kainozoic. To 
 quote the words of a skilful geologist whom I have 
 the pleasure to name as a friend of more than 
 thirty years' standing — Mr. Samuel Sharp, the author 
 of the most perfect ‘ Rudiments of Geology ' in the 
 English language : — 
 
 ‘‘ The break between the two, as indicated by 
 the utter change in animal and vegetable life, is so 
 complete as to be without parallel in the earth’s 
 geological history. . . . Not a species (except some 
 
 perhaps of microscopic forms,) whether of Mollusc, 
 8 
 
I06 DIVISIONS OF THE KAINOZOIC. 
 
 or Cephalopod, or Fish, or Reptile, or Mammal, or 
 Plant, of former periods, has remained : the whole 
 world of life has changed. A vast gulf intervenes, 
 as yet unbridged by science — a lapse of time so 
 great as perhaps to equal that which separates 
 the earliest Tertiary age from our own day. 
 
 Of this great interval, of its physical pheno- 
 mena, of its life changes, we know nothing. Whole 
 generations and families of living things may have 
 come into being and passed away, continents may 
 have given way to oceans, and oceans to continents, 
 whole ranges of mountains may have raised their 
 lofty peaks, and again subsided into plains, during 
 this mighty hiatus which human knowledge has 
 failed to fill.” 
 
 The Tertiary formation has been divided into 
 the ‘Eocene,^ ‘ Miocene,’ ‘ Pliocene,’ and ‘ Pleisto- 
 cene ’ strata, by Sir Charles Lyell j but the 
 Pleistocene is, of late, included under the new 
 term ‘ Quaternary ^ formation, which is meant 
 also to include the soil which has always been 
 considered as alluvial. Eocene means early iieiVy 
 and the other terms mean middle^ late^ and later- 
 
 new. 
 
THE EOCENE AND MIOCENE. 10 ^ 
 
 1. The ‘Eocene’ comprises the London clay, 
 which is visible at Highgate, passes under the metro- 
 polis, and reappears in the Isle of Sheppy and the 
 northern part of Kent : it also extends over parts 
 of Middlesex, Berkshire, Hampshire, Dorset and 
 Wilts, Surrey and Sussex, a small part of Suffolk, 
 and the greater part of Essex. In France, the 
 ‘ Eocene ’ includes the calcaire grassier^ and the 
 gypsum beds of Montmartre, in which were found 
 the petrifactions of Pachydermatous animals fore- 
 told by Cuvier. In the ‘ Eocene ’ is also included 
 the Nummulite limestone, which enters largely 
 into the composition of the Alps, the Pyrenees, 
 the Carpathians, and the Himalayas, and some of 
 the North American mountains — while the sphynx 
 and several of the Egyptian pyramids were formed 
 out of it. 
 
 2. The ‘ Miocene ’ is almost limited, in this 
 country, to Hampshire and the Isle of Wight ; but 
 it is extensive abroad, being found as a thick 
 stratum in Switzerland, France, Belgium, Croatia, 
 and some parts of Germany, Itcdy, and Greece ; it 
 is also found in the Siwalik Hills of India, and in 
 the United States of America. 
 
Io8 THE LAYER CALLED ‘ PLIOCENE.* 
 
 3. The ‘Pliocene^ is found in Essex, Suffolk, 
 and Norfolk, where it is named Red Crag and 
 Coral Crag ; and it is extensive in Italy. The 
 Black Crag of Belgium is also held to belong to 
 the ‘ Pliocene ; * and so is a part of the stratum 
 in eastern parts of the United States. In Sicily, 
 the ‘ Pliocene ^ covers nearly half the island. Sir 
 Charles Lyell says that since the accumulation of 
 these beds, the whole cone of Etna (11,000 feet in 
 height, and ninety miles in circumference at its 
 base,) has been slowly built up.” 
 
TEGETATION OF THE KAINOZOIC. 
 
 109 
 
 X. 
 
 PETRIFACTIONS FOUND IN THE TERTIARY OR 
 KAINOZOIC FORMATION. 
 
 HE vegetable kingdom, in this period, 
 
 ^ must have been richer even than in our own. 
 Lardner, in his ‘ Popular Geology,^ Hugh Miller, 
 and other practical geologists, give us gorgeous 
 pictures of the flora of the Kainozoic formation. 
 Agassiz, who may be considered a witness of the 
 first rank as to the ‘Testimony of the Rocks,’ 
 affirms that the botanical order Rosacece — which 
 includes not only the roses and potentillas, but so 
 many of our edible fruits, the bramble, raspberry, 
 strawberry, apple, pear, quince, cherry, plum, peach, 
 apricot, nectarine, and almond — was one of the 
 last creations of the Kainozoic, or was introduced 
 but a little time before Man appeared on the earth. 
 The polar regions, as well as the tropics, shared 
 
no 
 
 ANIMALS OF THE KAINOZOIC. 
 
 the luxuriance of vegetation, in the Tertiary 
 period. 
 
 With the exception of a few petrifactions held to 
 have belonged to Marsupials, in the Mesozoic, no 
 signs of the life of Mammalian animals have been 
 discovered till we come to the Kainozoic forma- 
 tion. The petrified remains of creatures allied to 
 every order of animals that suckle their young, 
 except Man, have been found in the Tertiary 
 formation, in our own country : the elephant, 
 rhinoceros, hippopotamus, tapir, swine, horse, ox, 
 bear, beaver, otter, deer, dog, whale, porpoise, and 
 many of the smaller four-footed creatures, have all 
 their representatives among the stony relics of this 
 period. Petrifactions of birds are not so numerous 
 as those of mammalian animals. But I must leave 
 you to gather more full and particular information 
 from Lyell and other treatises, in order that I may 
 have a little time to attend to a theory which is of 
 great importance. 
 
THE GLACIAL OR ICE PERIOD. 
 
 Ill 
 
 XI, 
 
 THE GLACIAL THEORY, AND THE GENERAL QUESTION 
 OF THE AGE OF THE EARTH. 
 
 'O be told that there was a period, in the 
 
 -A history of this globe, when Scotland to its 
 southern extremity was covered with ice two thou- 
 sand feet thick, is a cause of great wonderment to 
 people who hear of it for the first time. And the 
 wonder increases when they read that Sir Charles 
 Lyell says, in his carefully constructed book ‘ The 
 Student’s Manual of Geology ’ — ‘‘ We are gradually 
 obtaining proofs of the larger part of England, 
 north of aline drawn from the mouth of the Thames 
 to the Bristol Channel, having been under the sea, 
 and traversed by floating ice, since the commence- 
 ment of the Glacial Period. And when you are 
 told that a large part of North America, and of 
 Norway and Sweden, and Northern Russia and 
 
II2 
 
 MARKS OF THE GLACIAL PERIOD. 
 
 Denmark, have been, at one time, also covered 
 with this colossal layer of ice, the statement seems 
 startling. 
 
 Yet the Glacial or Ice Period is considered to 
 be an historical fact, by very solid deduction from 
 oth^r facts. The formation of glaciers, or immense 
 fields of ice, between two chains of hills, is a 
 familiar sight to tourists in Switzerland. These 
 ice -masses, or glaciers, are slowly but constantly 
 moving, until they melt ; and then they leave, all 
 along the middle of their path, a huge heap of 
 fragments of rock, roots and boles of trees, and 
 clay. These long piles of detritus are called 
 * moraines.’ Now these moraines are also found 
 in Scotland, between the chains of the Grampians, 
 and also in Sweden, North America, and Northern 
 Russia ; and it is argued that they have had a 
 similar cause to that of the Swiss moraines. Im- 
 mense grooves are also observed on the sides of 
 the Scottish, Swedish, and other mountains ; and 
 these are believed to be owing to the pressure and 
 grinding of icebergs. 
 
 From these, and other phenomena, geologists 
 conclude that the greater part of our island, Ireland, 
 
DIFFERENT THEORIES ABOUT IT. 
 
 ”3 
 
 Sweden, and the lands I have just named, were at 
 one time covered with ice, at least 2000 feet in 
 thickness. Ireland, they judge, was once one with 
 Great Britain ; and Great Britain was one with 
 France, until the occurrence of some great com- 
 motion that drove us all asunder. Animals, it is 
 believed, passed southward, easily, as the ice ap- 
 proached, when there were no Straits of Dover — 
 no English Channel. It is also held that they did 
 this several times — for the Glacial periods have 
 occurred again and again, and will again occur, it 
 is affirmed. 
 
 Various theories have been formed as to the 
 cause of this marvellous glacial visitation. Hopkins 
 attributed it to “ variation in the intensity of the 
 sun’s radiation.” Another theorist held the cause 
 to be “ the passing of our solar system, alternately, 
 into cooler and warmer space.” Sir John Lubbock 
 tells us that his father held that the glacial visitation 
 was caused by an alteration in our Earth’s axis, 
 arising from upheavals and depressions of great 
 magnitude on its surface. A fourth theory is that 
 the Glacial period occurred v\hen the gulf stream 
 had not yet warmed Europe. A fifth theory 
 
1 14 the theory of m. adhrmar. 
 
 maintains that the Sahara, or great African desert, 
 was formerly a part of the Atlantic — when th( 
 Fohn — the dry, burning wind which now strips 
 the snow from the Alps, would be a moist, dam) 
 wind, under which snow and ice would not melt. 
 
 In spite of Sir Charles Lyell, who holds that the 
 Glacial period occurred 800,000 years ago, and 
 of Sir John Lubbock, who contends that it was 
 200,000 years ago, a sixth theorist— M. Adhemar — 
 maintains that the great Ice visitation depends on 
 what is called ‘ the Precession of the equinoxes,’ 
 which takes 21,000 years for its accomplishment. 
 M. Adhemar is confident that only 11,120 years 
 have passed since the last Glacial period ; that 
 the climate of our northern hemisphere had been 
 warmer up to a.d. 1248 — now 630 years ago ; that 
 it has been cooling since that time \ and, of course, 
 that the frightful Glacial period will return in 
 another 10,000 years. Though none of us will be 
 ‘ in the flesh ’ then, yet a return of such a visita- 
 tion is not pleasant to contemplate. 
 
 But where theories are so various, — although 
 the theorists are, each and all, considered to 
 be ‘ experts ’ in the geological or other scientific 
 
CREDULITY OF GEOLOGISTS. 
 
 II5 
 
 line — one cannot regard the return of the Glacial 
 period as a coming event of complete certainly. 
 And it is for the same reason — that is to say. the 
 diversity of opinion among men of science, that 
 we can come to no settled opinion respecting the 
 age of the Earth. Sir Charles Lyell held that two 
 hundred and forty millions of years have elapsed 
 since the beginning of the Cambrian period — 
 while Mr. Darwin thinks that “ a far longer 
 period than three hundred millions of years has 
 elapsed since the latter part of the secondary 
 period ” — that is to say, since the existence of the 
 higher Chalk stratum, a calculation that would 
 lead one to suppose Mr. Darwin would date the 
 beginning of the Cambrian period a billion of 
 years ago ! Other naturalists and geologists main- 
 tain the same high rate of figures respecting the 
 age of the Earth. 
 
 The positive denial given by our great mathe- 
 maticians to the truth of these high figures is 
 remarkable. The theory of Helmholtz — that the 
 sun has been formed by a nebulous revolving 
 mass, filling a space far greater than that of the 
 solar system, and condensed by the attraction of 
 
Il6 MATHEMATICIANS DECIDE 
 
 gravitation, — is held to be the most probable theory 
 as to the source of the Sun’s heat. Now, as the 
 Sun radiates his heat to the bodies of the solar 
 system, it is argued that he must be cooling ; and 
 that he cannot have been giving out his heat at the 
 same rate as at present for more than a /ew millions 
 of years. Therefore, reasons Sir William Thomson, 
 who is said to be the first mathematician in Europe, 
 ‘‘the existing state of things on the earth, life on 
 the earth, and all geological history showing con- 
 tinuity of life, must be limited within some such 
 period as a hundred millions of years.” 
 
 Professor Croll cannot grant so much. He 
 would reduce the hundred millions to forty millions. 
 But Professor Tait is inexorably disposed to be cruel 
 with Mr. Darwin and Sir Charles Lyell. He sets 
 aside their teaching about hundreds of millions for 
 the existence of life on this earth, most uncere- 
 moniously, declaring that physical considerations 
 render it impossible that more than fe/i or fifteen 
 millions can be granted 1 About ten millions of 
 years ago, it is contended by this new school of 
 calculators, the surface of the Earth had just been 
 consolidated; and, after a few thousand years 
 
AGAINST THE GEOLOGISTS. II7 
 
 would be SO far cooled as to permit the beginnings 
 of life. But if we go back a hundred millions of 
 years, the Earth — if it existed at all — must have been 
 in a liquid white heat, and unfit for any kind or form 
 of life that we are acquainted with. Amidst such 
 conflicting opinions of the highest men of science, 
 we are still ‘ at sea ’ as to the age of our Earth ; 
 and think that even such very wise men would 
 have been wiser if they had held by the opinions 
 of some of the older geologists, that the facts of 
 geology give no evidence as to time. 
 
 We can only hold by the conviction from the 
 repetition of tropical and temperate climates 
 evident from the layers of the Earth, even in our 
 own country, — from the fact, which cannot be 
 doubted, that sea has often been land, and land 
 been sea, in the past; and that upheavals and 
 submersions of land go on very slowly, in our own 
 time, — that only immense periods of time will 
 account for it all. 
 
 One question will have been in the minds of 
 many of you while I have been talking : Is what 
 we are listening to in consistence with the teachings 
 of our Bible.? Nor will another question have 
 
ii8 
 
 A QUESTION DEFERRED. 
 
 been forgotten : What about man ? While you 
 have been affirming that petrifactions of the crea- 
 tures, from an insect to an elephant, have been 
 found in countless numbers, reckoning the Primary, 
 Secondary, and Tertiary formations together, — has 
 no petrifaction of a human form been found in any 
 of them ? 
 
 I purpose giving you distinct "and unhesitating 
 answers to these important questions to-morrow 
 night. 
 
THE MOSAIC RECORD OF CREATION. 
 

 •7 
 
 
 
 
 ■ K 
 
 'V' 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 \UTHORSHIP OF THE PENTATEUCH . , • . I24 
 
 II. 
 
 WHAT WERE THE ‘ DAYS ^ OF CREATION » » • I29 
 
 III. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : FIRST DAY , » » . I32 
 
 IV. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION; SECOND DAY. , , . I38 
 
 V. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : THIRD DAY . » . .145 
 
 VI. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : FOURTH DAY , , *152 
 
 VII. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : FIFTH DAY • • » . I56 
 
 VIII. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : SIXTH DAY .... I59 
 
 9 
 
122 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 IX. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE SEVENTH DAY : THE REST OF GOD, AND REST 
 
 OF MAN ' 164 
 
 X. 
 
 CONSIDERATION OF SOME OBJECTIONS « • . 168 
 
 XI. 
 
 THE AGE OF MAN : THE BONE CAVES : THE SUPPOSED 
 
 ‘FLINT IMPLExMENTS ’ I7I 
 
 XII. 
 
 Haeckel’s pedigree of man : weakness and folly 
 
 OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION . . . 181 
 
THE MOSAIC RECORD OF 
 CREATION. 
 
 I OPEN the Bible at the first chapter of Genesis, 
 to-night, — a somewhat novel proceeding for a 
 lecturer, — because I have undertaken, as a first 
 duty, to show that what we call ‘ The Mosaic 
 Record of Creation ' is not disproven by modern 
 discovery. I do not undertake to show that this 
 first chapter of Genesis is in accordance with all 
 the fanciful theories .of- Mr. Darwin, or all the wild 
 calculations of Sir Charles Lyell. But I do mean 
 to show that it is perfectly reconcileable with what 
 is called the Nebular Theory of Laplace, with Sir 
 Isaac Newton’s doctrine of Gravitation, with the 
 intelligent theory of Helmholtz respecting the 
 source cf the Sun’s heat, and with all the true 
 teachings of Geology. 
 
MOSES, A^D THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 1X4 
 
 I. 
 
 AUTHORSHIP OF THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 FEW preliminary words, please, as to what 
 
 we mean when we call these ^ The Five 
 Books of Moses.’ We often mention a book as 
 the work of one man, while, at the same time, we 
 know that a part, or parts, of the book are not to 
 be really accounted as his. Now, we cannot mean 
 that Moses wrote every part of these five books — • 
 for the death of Moses, and also his burial, are 
 recorded in the last chapter of Deuteronomy — 
 and Moses could not make that record. The 
 phrase “as it is unto this day,” which is often met 
 with in these books, also shows that a later hand 
 than that of Moses has sometimes been employed 
 in them. The Jews, doubtless, give us the true 
 tradition, when they tell us that Ezra ‘ the scribe’ 
 inserted this phrase, when new copies of the Torah, 
 
COLENSO, AND GERMAN THEORIES. 
 
 125 
 
 or Law, were written out for the use of many who 
 had been born in captivity, and were strangers in 
 the land of their fathers. 
 
 You will remember the excitement Colenso 
 raised in this country a few years ago, by trying to 
 popularize among us the German theory about 
 ancient Elohistic and Jehovistic documents having 
 been clumsily dovetailed into one, by a later writer, 
 to form this Pentateuch. Colenso told us that he 
 believed that writer to be the prophet Samuel — 
 though he had no more authority for his belief 
 than he had for attributing this imaginary dove- 
 tailing to Balaam’s ass, if the whim had seized him 
 to do that. The attempt by the Bishop of Natal 
 to destroy our faith in the genuineness and authen- 
 ticity of the first five books of the Bible was a 
 miserable failure. We still hold that there is the 
 Divine stamp upon them ; and yet we discern what 
 we consider to be strong evidence that several of 
 the opening chapters of the Pentateuch were not, 
 originally, the composition of Moses, — although 
 we do not doubt that they were arranged in their 
 present order by his hand. They are, evidently, 
 short documents by different authors. 
 
126 
 
 SHORT INDEPENDENT DOCUMENTS 
 
 Our first chapter of Genesis, and the first three 
 verses of the second chapter, form one indepen- 
 dent and general account of the Creation : in it, 
 the Creator is called by one name — Elohim^ which 
 is a plural word, and whenever it is used to desig- 
 nate God, it is united to a singular verb— in order, 
 as we believe, to express the act of the Triune 
 Deity. The second independent document begins 
 with the fourth verse of the second chapter, and 
 closes at the end of the third chapter : in it the 
 Divine Being is described by two names — Jehovah 
 Elohim ; and, now, a more particular account is 
 given of the creation of Man and Woman, and of 
 the primal temptation and fall of our first parents. 
 The third independent document consists of our 
 fourth chapter : and in it the Divinity is named by 
 one word — Jehovah. Many of you, no doubt, are 
 w^ell acquainted with all this ; and you also know 
 that there are marks of independent composition 
 in several of the chapters following. 
 
 I beg to state to such of you as may not have 
 heard of it, that, respecting the authorship of these 
 chapters, there is a very probable theory held by 
 Christian men of high intelligence and large Hebrew 
 
AT THE BEGINNING OF GENESIS. 
 
 127 
 
 learning. It is, that these short, independent docu- 
 ments, and also some longer records which follow 
 them, were composed by the early Patriarchs ; — 
 were preserved in what may be called * the Sacred 
 Family’ — the family from which Messiah should, 
 in due time, be born ; — were handed down, 
 through Abraham and his descendants, to the 
 heads of the tribes, in Egypt; — and thus came 
 into the possession of Moses, who prefixed them, 
 in the order in which they were composed, to the 
 larger work on the Exodus an(^ Wanderings of the 
 Children of Israel, and on God’s dealings with 
 them, which the Jewish legislator and leader him- 
 self undertook and performed. The first short 
 document is, no doubt, derived from Adam him- 
 self: the other documents are held to have had 
 Seth, Noah, and others, for their authors. 
 
 No amazement ought to be felt when it is main- 
 tained that this short, general account of the 
 creation, contained in this first chapter and three 
 verses of the second chapter of Genesis, is the 
 work of our great progenitor Adam. Who was 
 more likely to feel curiosity as to his own origin, 
 and the origin of all things around him. than the 
 
128 
 
 THE VISIONS OF ADAM. 
 
 first man? To whom would his Maker be so 
 likely to impart the positive knowledge that would 
 satisfy his own curiosity, and also enable him to 
 give the right knowledge to his descendants, as to 
 the first man — the head of his race ? 
 
 But how was this knowledge imparted to Adam ? 
 it will be asked. Our Milton, you know, repre- 
 sents ‘the affable archangel,’ as he calls Raphael, 
 delighting our great forefather by giving him the 
 narrative of Creation. Revelations of a super- 
 natural character are, however, represented, in 
 Scripture, as made by vision. With all my love 
 and reverence for the great soul of Milton, I can- 
 not help, therefore, concluding that this super- 
 natural revelation — for it cannot be called ‘ his- 
 tory,’ you know — was made to Adam in a series 
 of visions occupying the ‘ evening ’ and the ‘ morn- 
 ing ’ of six successive days of Adam. Another 
 important question now arises — Were the ‘days* 
 of Creation like Adam’s days and our days ? 
 
MANY MEANINGS OF ‘DAY/ 
 
 129 
 
 II 
 
 WHAT WERE THE ‘ DAYS ^ OF CREATION? 
 
 I NEED not remind you of the many names 
 of religious writers who hold to the notion 
 that the Creation-days were each twenty- four hours 
 long. I imagine your own reading of this first 
 chapter of Genesis must have shown you that the 
 word ‘ day ’ is used in two senses, in one verse — 
 the fifth : first, to denote the light, and then to 
 denote the evening and morning joined. In the 
 fourth verse of the second chapter, ‘ day ^ is used 
 to describe the whole period of Creation. So 
 there are three meanings to the word within a 
 small compass. 
 
 The phrase ‘ as it is unto this day,* already 
 mentioned, gives a fourth and looser meaning. 
 The fact is, that the Hebrew word ‘yom’ is just 
 as variable in its uses as our word ‘ day,’ or anj 
 
130 
 
 THE ‘days’ of creation 
 
 rvord in any other language which is commonly 
 used for a day. So that no reason for making 
 each period of Creation consist just of twenty- 
 four hours can be founded on the common use of 
 the word. 
 
 That there could be no day of twenty-four 
 hours before the formation of the Sun — which the 
 sacred record declares was not before the fourth 
 day — needs no argument to prove. One writer, 
 fearful of losing his reputation for orthodoxy, 
 strove to persuade his readers that all which 
 Geology shows us has ready occurred in the his- 
 tory of the earth, should be placed betw^een the 
 first and second verses of this first chapter of 
 Genesis ; and then we should understand the 
 remainder of the chapter as relating to the entire 
 re-arrangement of things in six days of twenty-four 
 hours each, just before man’s creation. No such 
 preposterous theory can be maintained now. 
 What Cuvier, and De Luc, and Jameson, and 
 Hugh Miller, and others, fearlessly taught from the 
 first, meets with few sensible and w^ell-informed 
 objectors at the present time. That the term 
 ‘day ’ is to be taken as meaning a period to which 
 
MUST HAVE BEEN PERIODS. 13 1 
 
 no man of science, however great his reputation, 
 has a right to assign any definitive duration — is 
 generally received as a truth — a settled fact — in 
 our own ‘ day/ 
 
 ‘‘A settled fact” — some of you will whisper — 
 ‘‘settled facts are often sorely unsettled, you know.” 
 Just so : and I do not wish to say you are not to 
 think about it. But, I respectfully remind you 
 that, when a clear and sensible reconciliation of 
 Science with Revelation is offered, there can be no 
 worthy reason for rejecting it 
 
132 
 
 HOW THE RECORD OF CREATION 
 
 III. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : THE FIRST DAY. 
 
 ET US now enter on the reading of the record. 
 
 ^ ^ I shall have to mention Hebrew words to 
 you. to-night. But I beg of you to understand 
 that I do not profess to be a profound Hebrew 
 scholar. I have had too many things to learn, in 
 order to teach others ; and my life has been too 
 full of vicissitude to admit of my becoming pro- 
 found in the knowledge of any language. Those 
 of you who have read the humble story I have 
 given of my own life know that, fifty years ago, — 
 while bending over the last and wielding the awl, 
 — I taught myself the elements of Hebrew, Greek, 
 Latin, and French. I have no time, now, to look 
 into a Greek classic; but I read my Greek Testa- 
 ment every morning of my life — unless I have to 
 travel very early, — and I always read sweet J ohn 
 
BEGINS, IN THE ORIGINAL. 
 
 133 
 
 first. He brings the Saviour so near to me, that 
 I must converse with him first. My busy life also 
 demands that I confine myself nearly to one Latin 
 book ; and so I always carry my Latin Virgil about 
 with me, to keep up my acquaintance with him. 
 As for French, one meets it, more or less, every 
 week, in books and periodicals : nor would I have 
 you think that I forget my Hebrew. Yet I shall 
 trouble you very little with it, and only from neces- 
 sity shall I use it, to prove myself in the right. 
 
 Berashith bara Elohim eth hashamayim we-eth 
 haaretz — begins the record. “ In beginning created 
 Elohim the heavens and the earth. In beginning,’' 
 — not ‘‘In the beginning.” There is no definite 
 article; and the great majority of Hebrew scholars 
 maintain that it is omitted on purpose. No defi- 
 nite time is signified. The word ‘ beginning’ is to 
 be taken for indefinite previous duration, or pre- 
 vious eternity. 
 
 The vulgar notion is that the Bible says our Earth 
 has only existed about 7000 years ; but there is 
 no such statement in the Bible. The Bible doe^' 
 not fix the age of the Earth, at all. Dr. Chalmers, 
 and Dr. Vaughan, and Dr. Hamilton, and Thomas 
 
134 
 
 TRUE THEORY OF LAPLACE. 
 
 Binney, and many modern divines, as well as Dear 
 Buckland and Sedgwick, have stated this fact ; 
 and Origen and Augustine, among the ancient 
 Fathers, and even our own Venerable Bede, main- 
 tained it. 
 
 But in what state did God create the heavens 
 and the earth ? The answer is — We-haaretz haye- 
 thah thohu wa-vohu we-choshek alpenei thehbm. 
 
 And the Earth was without form and void, and 
 darkness on the face of the deep.” There was no 
 Earth, in the proper sense of the word. It was not 
 formed. The matter of the Solar System was in 
 the form of cosmic vapour, according to the theory 
 of Laplace — which, I tell you plainly, I hold to be 
 a true theory, and wish I had more time to give 
 you all the reasons for my belief. 
 
 Our progenitor’s opening vision is that of the 
 formless mass of matter with darkness lying upon 
 it ; and, next, it is related — We-7'uach Elohim mera- 
 chepheth al-penei ha-mayhn, “ And spirit of Elohim 
 brooding on face of the waters.’^ I do not fear to 
 tell you my own conceptions. You can receive 
 them, or smile at them, as you please. But T think 
 I have Milton on my side in what I am going to 
 
THE DOVE, IN ADAMES VISION. 
 
 T35 
 
 say. Remember, he was a real Hebrew scholar — 
 he who says, 
 
 “ Thou from the first 
 
 Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread, 
 Dove-like, sat’st brooding on the vast abyss, 
 
 And madest it pregnant.” 
 
 My conception is, that Adam saw the image ol 
 a dove brooding on the cosmic vapour — just as 
 John the Baptist saw the image of the dove de- 
 scending on Jesus; and, as the Divine influence 
 showed Jchn that that was the sign he had been 
 inspired to look for — so the Divine influence in- 
 formed Adam that what he saw was a sign that 
 God, having first created matter, was now about 
 to form it, according to His own all-wise purposes. 
 Wa-yomer Elohirn yehi aur ; wa-yehi aur — are the 
 words that follow : ‘‘ And said Elohirn, Let there 
 be light, and there was light. 
 
 When the Divine command had been made 
 perceptible to Adam, he sees the vaporous mass 
 begin to revolve, and to condense — for God has 
 instituted motion and gravitation by His command; 
 and, from the collision and pressure together of 
 the revolving and condensing particles, heat arises. 
 
136 BEFORE MAN LEFT EDEN, 
 
 and, from heat, what Laplace calls ‘ the Cosmic 
 Light.’ 
 
 We may feel sure that if Voltaire had lived in 
 the time of his great countryman, Laplace, he 
 would not have imitated Celsus, the sceptic of the 
 second century, in laughing at the idea of light 
 existing before the sun existed. Let me beg of you 
 to keep in mind that the illustrious author of the 
 Mecanique Celeste, unfortunately, was an atheist. It 
 was his science — not his unbelief — which compelled 
 him to maintain that light existed before the sun, 
 and thus corroborate the truth of Biblical science. 
 
 The narrative proceeds ; And God saw the 
 light, that it was good ; and God divided between 
 the light and between the darkness. And God 
 called the light day, and the darkness He called 
 night.” That is to say, God taught man so to call 
 them. For I hold — and it is not a new theory, nor 
 a theory of fools — although your Ape-theory people 
 will laugh at it — that God taught man language. 
 And in teaching the creature He had made, God 
 would teach Adam something worth knowing and 
 retaining in mind : to connect light and day with 
 purity, and uprightness, and truth, and the beauty 
 
GOD TAUGHT HIM LANGUAGE. 
 
 137 
 
 of holiness ; and darkness and night with impurity, 
 and disorder, and confusion. The dividing of light 
 from darkness has, thus, a great meaning. 
 
 Wa-yehi erev wa-yehi voqer ydm echad, ^‘And 
 was evening and was morning day one,” concludes 
 the narrative of Adam's first vision, and of the 
 first period of God’s creation. The evening or 
 night disclosed the vision of chaos — of matter in 
 its elemental form of atoms and molecules, or 
 cosmic vapour ; and the morning or day showed 
 the mass set in motion — gravitation instituted — 
 and heat and light produced, at the Divine com- 
 mand. I humbly conceive that the scriptural 
 narrative of Adam’s vision shows us God’s mode 
 of working was such as to lead us to see nothing 
 objectionable in the Nebular or Cosmical theory of 
 Laplace. “ We shall be better able to judge of 
 that as you go on,” I think I hear some of you 
 saying, who do not like to be in a hurry in coming 
 to a conclusion. You are quite right. Only, I beg 
 to assure you that I have not come to this con- 
 clusion in a hurry. I am venturing to give you, 
 to-night, the result of the silent thinking and busy 
 
 reading of years. But we will proceed. 
 
 10 
 
138 
 
 THE SEPARATION OF THE RINGS 
 
 IV. 
 
 record of creation : the second day. 
 
 second day of creation must be con- 
 i sidered as consisting of an ‘ evening ’ and a 
 ‘morning,’ like the first day. And we are still to 
 regard each vision as occupying a part of a night, 
 and a part of a day, of Adam. The beginning of 
 each vision, or that which occurred in one of his 
 nights, it seems natural to conclude, would not 
 seeiu to relate so nearly to what concerned Adam 
 and his race, as the latter part of the vision, or that 
 which was presented to him on a part of one of 
 his days — although the night-vision might, in some 
 instances, represent a period of longer real duration 
 than the day-vision. 
 
 The second ertv^ or ‘evening,’ would not be a 
 representation of complete darkness, like the erev 
 of the first vision; for the ‘cosmical light’ would 
 
FROM WHICH PLANETS WERE FORMED. 1 39 
 
 not grow dimmer, as the condensation of the 
 ‘ revolving fire-mist ’ proceeded. But it would be 
 a vision of conflict and rapid change — or what to 
 Adam would seem like disorder, and would, there- 
 fore, be a period of partial darkness. The nebular 
 theory presents us with what we cannot hastily 
 reject, as the likeliest picture of this second erev^ 
 in Adam’s vision : separation of a succession of 
 rings from the revolving and condensing mass of 
 matter — their breaking up — and then the re-union 
 of parts of them to form planets, and of other 
 parts to form rings round the planets, and which 
 would eventually become moons. When the rings 
 from which Neptune, and Uranus, and Saturn, and 
 Jupiter, and the planet which may have been 
 severed into Asteroids, and Mars, had been 
 separated — the ring from which our earth was to 
 be formed would, next, become separate. 
 
 When the ring had broken up, and parts of it 
 had been united, an intensely heated mass— -as the 
 great Leibnitz said, in Newton’s time, and our 
 Phillips and modern geologists adopt his idea — 
 would form the primal nucleus of our Earth. And 
 as its unbroken spherical surface cooled, the vapour 
 
140 
 
 NECESSITY THAT THE RECORD 
 
 around it would cover it with water — so that it 
 would have the appearance of a watery ball. This 
 is also the conclusion of modern geologists ; and 
 this would be the appearance of our Earth at the 
 close of the first half — the erev — of Adam’s second 
 vision. 
 
 You may exclaim, “ But the Bible says nothing 
 about all this ! ” True. It only says there was 
 an erev ; and the ‘ evening ^ must have presented 
 something to Adam’s sight. The impression made 
 on his mind, in each vision, would be most vivid 
 and durable, where he has to give the picture of 
 what he beholds to his descendants. His com- 
 munication to them cannot consist of too many 
 details : that would destroy the very purpose of 
 the record Adam has to furnish : it would cause it 
 to be neglected and forgotten. 
 
 The record will have to be often repeated, and 
 kept before the eyes, and in the living memory, 
 of the Sacred Family, to preserve them from the 
 sun and moon and star worship, and the animal 
 worship, which grew up so early among the deserters 
 from that family. It must, therefore, be a digest of 
 what Adam saw, and not a full account, involving 
 
SHOULD BE FITTED FOR REHEARSAL. T4I 
 
 a multitude of details difficult to keep in mind. 
 So it told the Sacred Family, not that matter and 
 its forces were eternal, but that God created 
 matter — gave existence to it — and then instituted 
 its forces. Adam’s descendants were not to wor- 
 ship matter, or any of its forces or its forms : the 
 Creator of all was to be the sole object of their 
 worship. 
 
 The ‘ morning ^ of Adam’s second vision is thus 
 related in our translation : “ And God said, Let 
 there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, 
 and let it divide the waters from the waters. And 
 God made the firmament, and divided the waters 
 which were under the firmament from the waters 
 which were above the firmament. And it was 
 so.'’ 
 
 The new translation, which is now being made 
 by a company of learned men, will abolish the 
 word firmament^ for such a word — which has been 
 the cause of so much adverse criticism — should 
 never have been used in this verse. The Hebrew 
 word raqia means * expanse,’ or something spread 
 out. 
 
 “ How came the wrong translation to be made ?” 
 
T42 
 
 CAUSE OF MISTRANSLATION. 
 
 you will ask; and I have to reply that it was 
 caused by men’s ignorance of true science. St. 
 Jerome, — the author of the Latin translation, 
 called the Vulgate, which is used by the Romish 
 Church, — had the Septuagint before him, as well 
 as the Hebrew text, and coined the word crrcpew/xa 
 into firmarnentum — both words signifying something 
 solid or firm; and our translators, three hundred 
 years ago, cut off the um at the end, and gave us 
 firmament. For the authors of the Greek and Latin 
 franslations, as well as our good old forefathers, 
 were all believers in the blundering system of 
 ancient astronomy which made our poor little 
 Earth the centre of the whole universe, and placed 
 a solid dome, or firmament^ over us, beyond the 
 orbits of the planets. 
 
 Our business is not with the correction of the 
 blunder, in the translation now being formed. We 
 hope we can leave that safely to the men who have 
 undertaken to give us — so far as they can agree— 
 the most correct English version possible of the 
 revealed Word of God. Yet we must correct the 
 blunder for ourselves. We must remember that 
 there is no account of a firmament really in :he 
 
CREATION OF THE ATMOSPHERE. 
 
 143 
 
 Bible. Carry the word ‘ expanse ’ in your mind, 
 as you read, and you will always find it agree wiih 
 descriptions of the heavens, in the Bible. 
 
 What was it, then, that God made, and which 
 was first beheld by Adam, during the ‘morning’ ol 
 his second vision ? The Atmosphere : “ the blue 
 ethereal sky,” as we have it in Addison’s fine 
 hymn ; and it divided the waters which covered 
 this earthly ball, from the vapours which still sur- 
 rounded it, and which, by a further transformation, 
 might contribute to form a satellite. 
 
 We are told that God called the expanse 
 Heaven ^ — that is to say. He taught man so to call 
 it. In order to remind man, when he looks upward, 
 that this Earth is not the sole corner of existence ; 
 that when he thus gazes into the clear regions of 
 space, he may remember that in those regions are 
 the abodes of higher existences, to whom he is to re- 
 gard himself as related, and whose happy company 
 he may join, when his pilgrimage here is ended. 
 
 Wa-yehi erev, wa-yehi voqer, yd??i sheni - — “And 
 was evening and was morning day second ” is the 
 formula with which the account of the second day’s 
 creation ends. 
 
144 
 
 INDEFINITE LENGTH OF ' DAYS.' 
 
 The vision of Adam occupied him, as before, 
 only for an evening and a morning of his own day ; 
 our ‘natural day,’ as we call it. But how long 
 w^as the real period of the second day’s work of 
 the Creator, as represented to the first man, none 
 of us can possibly know. It may have been thou- 
 sands, or even millions, of years ; but no man, 
 however skilful in science, has any right to affirm, 
 or to pretend, that he can make a probable reckon- 
 ing of its exact duration. 
 
THE THEORY OF PHILLIPS. 
 
 145 
 
 V. 
 
 RECORD OF creation: THE THIRD DAY. 
 
 ' I "HE creation-work of the third day, alluded 
 ^ to in the 9th, loth, nth, 12th, and 13th 
 verses of our translation of the first chapter in the 
 Bible, seems to be divided into two parts : the 
 work of the erev, or ‘ evening,’ and the work of 
 the voqer^ or ‘ morning.* 
 
 Taking up the theory of Phillips, accepted by 
 the geologists of the present time, at ^he point 
 where we left it, — that the hot nucleus of the 
 earth had been formed, and then, its unoroken 
 spherical surface cooled, and entirely covered 
 with water, — we proceed to the remainder of 
 Phillips’ theory. The nucleus, in the process of 
 solidification, would shrink ; and the shrinkage 
 would cause rents in its surface. Into these 
 fissures the surrounding water would enter \ and a 
 
146 
 
 THIRD DAY^S CREATION: 
 
 great force of steam being thus generated, the 
 first great breaking up of the earth’s crust would 
 occur, and the early Palaeozoic rocks and seas 
 would be formed. The work of the erev would 
 thus again seem, in Adam’s vision, a period of 
 conflict, change, and disorder; and such change 
 would cause an obscuration of the cosmic light, 
 and thus the erev would, again, be a period of 
 partial darkness. 
 
 The work of the erev is thus described in our 
 translation : And God said. Let the waters be 
 gathered together from under the heavens unto 
 one place, and let the dry land appear : and it was 
 so. And God called the dry land earth, and the 
 gathering together of the waters called He seas : 
 and God saw that it was good.” The dry land 
 appeared: the Earth was no longer a seeming 
 watery ball : it was now land and water ; and 
 God saw that it was good : ” it was fitted for 
 the support of the varied forms of life with which 
 His wisdom and beneficence purposed to store 
 it, successively, in the future. 
 
 I do not see why the creation and growth of 
 algae and zoophytes — the creation and multiplica- 
 
THE PALEOZOIC PERIOD. 
 
 147 
 
 tion of trilobites, and then of ganoid fishes, and 
 the gradual transformation of ocean beds into 
 rocks — should not be understood as going on 
 during the third erev. I know that many have 
 a strong objection to grant this, and to say that 
 none of this is recorded in the Bible, although 
 geology shows us that animal life abounded before 
 terrestrial plants grew. And in order to meet 
 this objection the leading American geologists are 
 contending that it is most probable terrestrial 
 plants did exist before the beginning of animal 
 life — for the Laurentian rocks, which they are now 
 calling ^ Eozoic,’ are com.posed very largely of 
 graphite^ a mineral which is chiefly carbon, and 
 that may have been supplied by the grinding up 
 of an immense growth of primeval vegetation. 
 
 The American geologists would thus allot the 
 formation of the Laurentian rocks only, to the 
 third day’s creation. I humbly prefer to hold, 
 with Hugh Miller, that the whole range of 
 Palaeozoic rocks were formed during the third 
 erev — were formed from upraised ocean -beds on 
 which had rested the waters wherein lived, not 
 only such Rhizopods as the Eozoon Canadense, 
 
THIRD morning’s VISION. 
 
 148 
 
 but the immense crowds of Articulata and Mol- 
 lusca which the Stone Book shows us existed in 
 that ancient period, — together with the swarming 
 Trilobites and multitudinous Ganoid and Placoid 
 fishes. 
 
 They are not mentioned in the sacred record 
 for the reason I have already given, in answer to 
 the like objection : it would have destroyed the 
 purpose of the record, if it had been crowded 
 with limitless details : Adam’s descendants could 
 •.lot have familiarised their memories with it, so as 
 to preserve in their minds a dread of false and 
 idolatrous worship, and a fear of departing from 
 the Living God. 
 
 The work of the third voqer^ or ‘morning,’ is 
 described in the words that follow the passage 
 already quoted: “And God said. Let the earth 
 bring forth grass ^ the herb yielding seed, and the 
 fruit tree yielding fruit, after his kind, which hath 
 its seed in itself, upon the earth : and it was so. 
 And the earth brought forth grass, the herb yield- 
 ing seed, after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, 
 which hath its seed in itself, after his kind. And 
 God saw that it was good.” 
 
GROWTH OF THE COAL PLANTS. 
 
 149 
 
 The Hebrew word deshe is not properly trans- 
 lated grass. It means vegetation, or herbage. 
 The whole passage evidently points — as noble 
 Hugh Miller has so eloquently shown — to the 
 gigantic horsetails, ferns, club -mosses, and conifers 
 thrown up by the hot and steaming earth, in the 
 Carboniferous period. I see nothing valid in the 
 objection that the conifers are not fruit trees. Not 
 according to strict botanical nomenclature, I 
 grant ; but the cones and berries of the pines, 
 araucarias, yews, and junipers may be termed fruit 
 without any monstrous violation of language. The 
 Stone Book, on its carboniferous pages, contains 
 the natural record which has its inspired parallel in 
 the eleventh and twelfth verses of this chapter : the 
 record of the creation-work of the third ‘ morning.’ 
 
 Do not let me omit to call your attention to the 
 peculiar expression “ after his kind,” which follows 
 the mention both of the “ herb yielding seed,” and 
 of the ‘‘ tree yielding fruit.” God created each 
 ‘‘ after his kind.” He did not create a single 
 primordial plant, and let ‘ natural selection ’ form 
 the other plants out of it, according to Mr. 
 Darwin’s notion, in the ‘ Origin of Species.’ God 
 
150 
 
 god’s wise provision 
 
 created each ‘‘after his kind:” the various kinds, 
 or species, of plants were His creation : they did 
 not come into existence by ‘ natural selection.’ 
 
 Wa yehi Erev^ wa yehi Voqer, ydm shelishi ^ — 
 “ And was evening, and was morning, day third,” 
 ends the record of the third day’s vision. The 
 formula is repeated, and we see formula in other 
 parts of the record : a very evident sign that it was 
 intended to be committed to memory, and often 
 rehearsed. 
 
 Geologists hold that the atmosphere, when it 
 Vvas first formed, contained carbonic acid as a 
 much larger component than it does now. The 
 Maker so furnished it, that the gigantic plants of 
 the coal measures might have their nutriment. 
 His beneficence was thus storing up the supply of 
 fuel for His crowning creature, Man, in the future; 
 while, by the abstraction of the carbonic acid 
 surplus. He was preparing the atmosphere for the 
 breathing of animals which were next to appear on 
 the earth and in the waters. 
 
 The sacred narrative, at the next step, will leave 
 the Earth ; but we may hold that, while it treats of 
 the formation of other bodies, on the fourth day. 
 
IN THE FIRST ATMOSPHERE. 151 
 
 the growth upon growth of the coal-seams may be 
 considered as going on, also on the fourth day — 
 and thus a long period be occupied with the car- 
 boniferous strata, as geologists contend. 
 
 The ‘ evening ’ and the ‘ morning ^ of the third 
 day’s creation-work may each have extended 
 through many thousands of years’ duration. But 
 I repeat, no man, however high his scientific 
 reputation, has any right to attach any definite time 
 to either period. 
 
IS2 
 
 FOURTH day’s CREATIONf 
 
 VI. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : THE FOURTH DAY. 
 
 RECEDING the ‘morning' of the fourth 
 
 ^ day's vision of Adam, there would be an 
 ereVy or ‘ evening ' ; and it would be, like the 
 evenings before it, a period of conflict, change, 
 and seeming discord, and therefore of partial 
 darkness, notwithstanding the increasing light of 
 the great condensing or gravitating mass of cosmic 
 matter. 
 
 Pursuing the teaching of the nebular or cosmical 
 theory of Laplace, we depicture to ourselves what 
 would form the first half of our great progenitor’s 
 fourth vision : separation of the rings which are 
 to form the planets Venus and Mercury; and then 
 the breaking up of these rings, and formation of 
 the two planets. The cosmic vapour around the 
 <5arth and its ‘ expanse ’ would also have formed a 
 
FORMATION OF THE SUN. 
 
 153 
 
 ring, and have broken up and formed our moon. 
 Its heat would be comparatively little ; and when 
 its body had cooled, it would become what it is 
 held to be now — a mere burnt-out cinder, and in 
 itself dark. 
 
 But the most appalling conflict of matter and 
 its forces Adam would behold on that fourth erev^ 
 would be the final condensation and pressure of so 
 great a mass of cosmic matter to form the Sun — a 
 mass which is more than a million times larger than 
 our Earth. I have said finals but the word must be 
 corrected. According to the enlightened teaching 
 of Helmholtz, the condensation is never com.plete : 
 the pressure continues, and it is the chief source 
 of the Sun’s continued heat. The contraction of 
 the Sun only a ten-thousandth part of the length 
 of his diameter, Helmholtz calculates, would gene- 
 rate heat to last through two thousand years of 
 radiation. 
 
 Sir William Thomson, and Mayer, and Norman 
 Lockyer, and others, conjecture that meteoric 
 bodies are also almost incessantly falling into the 
 Sun, and thus contributing to feed his fire, — that 
 fire of which we receive but a small proportion, 
 
 II 
 
154 
 
 SOLAR SYSTEM COMPLETE. 
 
 and yet it keeps up the life of nature through the 
 almighty and infinite energy of Him who is the 
 source and sustentation of all life. Read Mr. 
 Proctor’s grand volume on the Sun ; and if it does 
 not fill your minds with reverential awe for the 
 Divine Creator, I know not what will. 
 
 When the conflict had been withdrawn from 
 Adam’s vision, he would be shown the moon, 
 the earth, and the planets, lit up by the splendour 
 of the sun. And the fourth morning would show 
 him the great ofifices the Sun sustains in Nature. 
 
 Allow me to give you a more literal translation 
 than that of our present authorised version, of 
 verses fourteen to nineteen, inclusive, of this first 
 chapter, in order more clearly to show how accord- 
 ant the sacred narrative is with the real teachings 
 of science : — 
 
 ‘‘And said Elohim, Let there be light-givers in 
 expanse of the heavens, to divide between the 
 day and between the night ; and let them be for 
 signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. 
 And let them be for light -givers in expanse of the 
 heavens to give light upon the earth ; and it was 
 so. And made created, — ‘ made ’ or ‘ formed *) 
 
TWO GREAT ‘LIGHT-GIVERS.’ 
 
 I5S 
 
 Elohim two the light-givers : the light-giver the 
 great for ruling the day, and the light-giver the 
 lesser for ruling the night : the stars also. And set 
 them Elohim in expanse of the heavens, to give 
 light upon the earth, and to rule over the day, and 
 over the night, and to divide between the light and 
 between the darkness : and saw Elohim that it was 
 good.” And then follows the formula — Wa yehi 
 Erev^ wayehi Voqer, ydm revil — “ And was evening, 
 and was morning, day fourth.” 
 
 You will have marked the fitness of the term 
 ‘ light-givers.’ It is such a literal translation of the 
 Hebrew meoroth^ that it is a wonder our old trans- 
 lators missed it. You will have observed, too, how 
 accidentally — shall I say ? — “ the stars also ” seem 
 dropped into the narrative, as if it were meant to 
 teach that they were all made by God, but not all 
 on the fourth day of creation. Some learned men 
 think that the planets only are pointed out in the 
 words ha-kokkavim^ rendered ‘ the stars.’ For the 
 vision of the fourth day is, evidently, a revelation 
 to Adam of the completion of the solar system. 
 The record, at the next step, returns to our 
 Earth. 
 

 FIFTH evening’s VISION. 
 
 VIL 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : THE FIFTH DAY. 
 
 S before, there would be an erev^ or ‘ evening,* 
 
 ^ to commence our first parent’s vision of the 
 fifth day’s creation-work. That unconformity on 
 which geologists insist, between the rocks of the 
 Primary and Secondary formations — the ‘ faults * 
 and distortions of the Carboniferous strata, and the 
 strange dolomite forms of the Permian, indicate 
 the conflict and change and seeming disorder, and 
 therefore partial darkness, of the first half of 
 Adam’s fifth vision : the passage from the Palaeo- 
 zoic to the Mesozoic formation. 
 
 Of the voqer, or ‘morning,’ that followed, the 
 chief feature of creation-work on the fifth day is 
 recorded in verses twenty-one and twenty-two of 
 this first chapter of Genesis. There are no details 
 of the growth of gigantic cycads and conifers, or 
 
THE MESOZOIC PERIOD. 
 
 ^57 
 
 of the multitudinous existence of ammonites and 
 other molluscs, in the Mesozoic. The record is 
 not crowded with countless particularities which 
 would have rendered it difficult to remember, and 
 therefore unfit for frequent rehearsal. It points 
 emphatically to the reptile life — the great dominant 
 life of the Mesozoic formation, which has often 
 been termed ‘ the reign of reptiles.^ 
 
 Poor Hugh Miller was assailed as misrepresent- 
 ing the Geology of the Mesozoic, in order to fit 
 it for proving the truth of this fifth day’s record. 
 But he never denied that some petrifactions of 
 small reptile life — beginnings of it — had been found 
 in the Palaeozoic. He simply maintained, what 
 nobody can deny, that the Stone Book proves 
 reptile life to have been the dominant life of the 
 Mesozoic, and that only in that formation was it 
 abundant. 
 
 Our old translators have again followed the 
 Septuagint, which gives us ktJtoi, ‘ whales,’ instead 
 of translating the Hebrew taninim ‘ reptiles,’ as it 
 ought to be translated. They seem to have been 
 really puzzled with the translation of this word, 
 for they have rendered it ‘ dragons,’ again and 
 
158 THE REIGN OF REPTILES. 
 
 again, — applying it, sometimes, to the ‘ dragon ’ 
 of the Nile, the crocodile, — a plain proof that they 
 must have doubted the correctness of the Sep- 
 tuagint version ‘whales,’ although they had fol- 
 lowed it. Doubtless, by ha-taninhn ha-gedolim^ 
 ‘the reptiles the great,' the huge saurians of the 
 Mesozoic are pointed out with the clearness of a 
 sunbeam. Oph kanaph^ or ‘fowl of wing,' may 
 include the Pterodactyls, as well as \md^%^toothed 
 birds with feathers, of which petrifactions have 
 been found in the Mesozoic. 
 
 The prevalent life of colossal destructive crea- 
 tures, such as the Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, and 
 the other great fish-lizards, is a part of the greatest 
 of all problems — the mystery of evil — which none 
 of us will ever be able to solve, in this life. This 
 record assures us that “God saw that it was good." 
 
 The formula Wa-yehi Erev^ wa-yehi Voger^yom 
 chamishi — “And was evening, and was morning, 
 day fifth," concludes the narrative of the fifth vision 
 of the first man. 
 
THE GREAT UNCONFORMITY. 
 
 159 
 
 vm. 
 
 RECORD OF CREATION : THE SIXTH DAY. 
 
 “ T T is almost unnecessary to say,’^ says Prin- 
 ^ cipal Dawson, in his valuable new book, 
 ‘ The Origin of the World, according to Revelation 
 and Science’ — ‘^this period corresponds with the 
 Tertiary or Kainozoic era of geologists.” So, the 
 great Canadian man of science does not, in this 
 instance, dissent from the judgment of Hugh 
 Miller. 
 
 ‘‘ Perhaps no geological change is more striking 
 and remarkable,” continues Dr. Dawson, ‘‘than 
 the sudden disappearance of the reptilian fauna at 
 the close of the Mesozoic, and the equally abrupt 
 appearance of numerous species of large mammals, 
 and this not in one region only, but over both the 
 great continents, and not only where a sudden 
 b^eak occurs in the series of formations, but also 
 
l6o THE GREAT MAMMALIANS 
 
 where, as in Western America, they pass gradually 
 into each other.*^ 
 
 That unconformity^ which all geologists thus 
 affirm to be so strongly characteristic of the pas- 
 sage from the Secondary to the Tertiary forma- 
 tion, would present to Adam a resemblance of the 
 seeming disorder which marked the passage of the 
 Primary to the Secondary ; like it, it would partially 
 obscure the new light of the Sun ; — and would 
 occupy the erev^ or ‘ evening,’ of Adam’s sixth 
 vision. 
 
 The w^cr, or ‘morning’ of the sixth day’s 
 creation-work, is revealed in the twenty-fourth 
 to the thirty-first verses, inclusive, of this chapter ; 
 and is also revealed in the Kainozoic pages of the 
 Stone Book — save that no human petrifactions 
 have been found in it. 
 
 A few Marsupials — the lowest form of mammals 
 ■ — lived during the Mesozoic, but none of the 
 higher forms. In the Kainozoic, as depictured in 
 Genesis, Behemah^ or ‘cattle,’ are mentioned first: 
 the word is chief! employed in the Bible to denote 
 what are called herbivorous animals ; and they are 
 creatures whose petrifactions are most abundant in 
 
OF THE KAINOZOIC PERIOD. l6l 
 
 this formation : gigantic pachyderms, allied to the 
 Tapir, the Hippopotamus, the Rhinoceros, and 
 the Elephant. Nor are other forms of the thick- 
 skinned animals wanting : the modern Horse, and 
 Swine, have their representatives, or allied forms, 
 also in the Kainozoic. 
 
 The word which is translated ‘ creeping thing ^ 
 may have reference to the Serpent forms whose 
 petrifactions are found in the Kainozoic, and also 
 to the abundance of Turtles. ‘‘ More species of 
 true turtles,’’ says Owen, in his ‘ Palaeontology,’ 
 have left their remains in the London Clay, at 
 the mouth of the Thames, than are now known tc 
 exist in the whole world; and all Eocene chelones 
 (turMes) are extmct.” 
 
 The other term — * beast of the earth,’ as it is 
 here rendered, is held to describe carnivorous 
 creatures ; and the Lion, Leopard, Bear, Hyaena, 
 Wolf, Dog, Fox, Otter, and other flesh-eating 
 creatures — but all of different species as com- 
 pared with ours — have all their allied forms in the 
 Kainozoic. 
 
 ‘‘After his kind,” and “ after their kind,” are the 
 declarations used, you will observe, to describe God’s 
 
i 62 
 
 MAN FORMED IN GOD S IMAGE.* 
 
 formation of the animals, in the visions both of the 
 fifth and sixth days. The Bible is utterly opposed 
 to Dr. Darwin’s doctrine of ‘ Natural Selection,* 
 in its account of the introduction of animal life, as 
 well as of vegetable life, on the earth : it asserts that 
 God made the species of animals, and also the species 
 of plants : that neither came by ‘Natural Selection.’ 
 
 The clear, emphatic manner in which Man’s 
 existence is introduced as beginning at the close 
 of the sixth day, by an especial act of God, must 
 for ever separate believers in the Bible from the 
 disciples of Evolution. Twice it is declared that 
 God “ made Man in His own image : in the imasfe 
 of God created He him.” This cannot mean, nor 
 can it be made to mean, that Man was formed out 
 of some creature, which was formed out of one of 
 the Anthropoid Apes, by ‘ Natural Selection.* It 
 is little that is said, in this most ancient of all re- 
 cords, but the little that is said about Man, and 
 God’s purpose in creating him, shows that God 
 Himself designed Man to be the crown of His 
 earthly creation — for God gives Man dominion 
 over it in terms which leave it impossible for us to 
 doubt His great purpose. 
 
VEGETABLE FOOD OF PARADISE. 1 63 
 
 Man’s food, and likewise the food of the crea- 
 tures who are with him, is appointed to be vegetable 
 food, in this chapter, — for there would be no rave- 
 nous beasts or birds with him in Eden, nor would 
 he destroy life, while he lived in innocence. 
 
 Wa-yehi erev ; wa-yehi voqer^ yam ha-shishl — • 
 ‘‘ And was evening, and was morning, day 
 sixth,” is, finally^ the formula closing the day’s 
 vision. Man having been created towards the 
 close of the sixth day, be it observed, could have 
 had no seventh day, when God’s seventh day 
 began — had God’s creation- days been exactly of 
 the length of man’s days — days of twenty-four 
 hours each. The seventh day of creation must, 
 then, have been Man’s first day. 
 
164 
 
 HUGH MILLER'S REASONING 
 
 IX, 
 
 THE SEVENTH DAY : THE REST OF GOD, AND THE 
 
 REST OF MAN. 
 
 NE of the strongest objections urged against 
 
 an interpretation of the creative ‘ days ’ into 
 periods is contained in the question, so often 
 urged, “ How can we keep the Sabbath as God 
 kept it, unless the days of creation were natural 
 days — days of the same length as our own? The 
 answer is, ‘‘ Prove to us that the seventh day, 
 mentioned in the second and third verses of the 
 second chapter of Genesis, was a natural day — 
 a day of twenty-four hours. The Divine record 
 does not say that God’s seventh day ended. It 
 leaves us, rather, to contemplate the reason why 
 His seventh day has not yet ended.’^ 
 
 ‘‘I know not,’^ reasons noble Hugh Miller, 
 where we shall find grounds for the oelief that 
 
CONCERNING THE SABBATH-DAY. 165 
 
 the Sabbath day during which God rested was 
 merely commensurate with one of the Sabbaths 
 of short-lived man, — a brief period measured by a 
 single revolution of the earth on its axis. We 
 have not, as has been shown, a shadow of evi- 
 dence that He resumed His work of creation on 
 the morrow : the geologist finds no trace of post- 
 Adamic creation : the theologian can tell us of 
 none. God’s Sabbath of rest may still exist, the 
 work of redemption may be the work of His 
 Sabbath-day. That elevatory process through suc- 
 cessive acts of creation, which engaged him during 
 myriads of ages, was of an ordinary week-day 
 character ; but when the term of His moral 
 government began, the elevatory process peculiar 
 to it assumed the divine character of the Sabbath. 
 This special view appears to lend peculiar emphasis 
 to the reason embodied in the commandment. 
 The collation of the passage with the geologic 
 record seems, as if by a species of re-translation, 
 to make it enunciate as its injunction, ‘‘ Keep this 
 day, not merely as a day of memorial related to a 
 past fact, but also as a day of co-operation with 
 God in the work of elevation, in relation both to a 
 
i66 
 
 NO REASON WHY GOD’s DAYS 
 
 present fact and a future purpose.” God keeps 
 His Sabbath,” it says, in order that He may 
 save : keep yours also that ye may be saved.” 
 
 “But could not God have made all that you 
 say He has made in periods, some of them at 
 least of great length, in six of our natural days ? ” 
 Undoubtedly He could have done it, but where is 
 the proof that He has so done it ? and w^hat pur- 
 pose could be answered by His having so done it? 
 We see the evidence of gradual progress as unmis- 
 takably written by His almighty hand on the leaves 
 of the Stone Book, as we see the evidence of His 
 all-wise mind in the design and contrivance which 
 marks all living Nature. “ The invisible things of 
 Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly 
 seen, being understood by the things that are 
 made,” we reason to be a strict truth, when we 
 mark the evidence of design in the formation of 
 an eye. We do not think that we are deceived 
 when we so reason. Why should we think we 
 are deceived when we mark gradual progress in 
 the creation -work ? What purpose could be 
 served by God’s performance in a few hours of 
 what our reason shows us must have taken long 
 
SHOULD BE AS SHORT AS OURS. 167 
 
 periods of years, or ages, to bring into existence ? 
 And are not all reasonings about the length of the 
 creation-days, after all, trifling? Is not all time 
 relative ? What seems a short time to us, now, 
 would seem a long time if our lives were never 
 longer than twenty years. And what seems a long 
 time to us, would have seemed a short time to one 
 of the antediluvians whose life fell little short of 
 a thousand years in length. God has eternity to 
 work in. Why should He have made the earth, 
 and its countless and varied inhabitants, in six 
 days, just of twenty -four hours each? 
 
i68 
 
 THOUGHTS ON THE AUTHORSHIP 
 
 X. 
 
 CONSIDERATION OF SOME OBJECTIONS. 
 
 ^ HY should we give up our long-established 
 
 belief that the whole book of Genesis 
 
 is an inspired revelation to Moses, and receive a 
 mere theory that a part of it consists of documents 
 much older than the time of Moses ? — and why 
 should we receive it as a fact, that the record in 
 the first of Genesis is a record of Adam’s visions ? 
 It is a mere theory.” 
 
 I reply, my friend, that your belief is all theory. 
 The name of Moses — or any allusion to him — is 
 not to be found in any one of the fifty chapters of 
 Genesis. You have no authority for saying, or 
 believing, that the book of Genesis is “a reve- 
 lation to Moses.” When you read, ‘‘ And God 
 spake unto Moses,” in the books that follow, I 
 hold most truly that you and I have ‘‘a revela- 
 
OF THE EARLY PART OF GENESIS. 1 69 
 
 tion to Moses ; but there are no such words in 
 Genesis. 
 
 I pray you to mark how orderly, how full of 
 exact sequence, is the sacred record, when it is 
 declared to be ‘‘a revelation to Moses.*' Now, 
 can you persuade yourself that a legislator, a leader 
 — we may say, of unequalled character — a man of 
 orderly and commanding mind, would be likely to 
 write the early history of Man in the way that 
 several of the opening chapters of Genesis are 
 written ? Would he give a short general account 
 of Creation — then begin his work again, and give 
 us the history in another form — then give us 
 beginning after beginning of fragments of history ? 
 Do the opening chapters of Genesis look like the 
 work of one orderly and powerful mind, to which a 
 special and Divine revelation has been made ? 
 
 And why should any one think we are taking 
 something valuable from him, by destroying his old 
 persuasion that Genesis is, simply, a revelation to 
 Moses? Is not the character of the record en- 
 hanced unspeakably in value by the belief that the 
 opening chapters were memorials left by the first 
 
 and earliest of our race — had been most sacredly 
 12 
 
1 70 GREAT USES OF ADAM’S VISIONS. 
 
 preserved — and were accounted so sacred by Moses 
 that he accounted it his strict duty to place them, 
 unaltered, at the head of the longer record which 
 he intended to complete? 
 
 I beg to say one word in defence of my own 
 theory, in reply to those who have asked me — 
 
 Why are you not content with the theory of 
 Kurtz and Hugh Miller, that the first chapter of 
 Genesis consists of a series of visions beheld by 
 Moses ? 
 
 Because it leaves us in the very difficulty I have 
 just alluded to : that of supposing that he could 
 write in a disjointed and unorderly manner. 
 
 But my great objection to the theory that the 
 first of Genesis is either a revelation to Moses, or 
 a series of the visions of Moses, is — that it abolishes 
 the precious fact of the great salutary and sanctify- 
 ing uses which the record of Adam’s visions was 
 to serve for the children of Adam and their chil- 
 dren’s children : it was to be their grand preserva- 
 tive against idolatry. 
 
M. *BOUCHER DE PERTHES. 
 
 171 
 
 XL 
 
 THE AGE OF MAN : THE BONE CAVES I THE 
 SUPPOSED ‘flint implements.’ 
 
 ET US leave the subject which has occupied 
 
 -1 — ^ us so long, and turn to another and more 
 modern chapter of controversy. Many geologists 
 of high name and reputation have manifested a 
 most eager desire to have it believed that Man 
 has existed a great deal longer on the earth than 
 the Bible account declares — even when the dif- 
 ferent numbers of the Hebrew text, the Samaritan 
 Pentateuch, and the Septuagint, have been com- 
 pared and digested, and set down as extending 
 not simply to 7,000 years, but possibly to 10,000 
 
 years. 
 
 Boucher de Perthes, a French gentleman of 
 Abbeville, may be considered as giving the start 
 to the very wild fancies about the age of Man 
 
IJ2 THE FLINTS AND HIS FA^fclES. 
 
 on the earth which have become so common with 
 leading geologists. He first observed in 1841 
 what he regarded as a flint hatchet made by 
 human hands, among some Mammalian petrifac- 
 tions ; and soon after found other chipped or 
 split flints which he also believed to be the work 
 of early men. In 1846, he published a book 
 affirming that he had discovered human implements 
 in the Drift ; and in the next year he put forth 
 another book, with drawings of the Flints. Most 
 people looked upon him as a mere enthusiast, 
 and did not hesitate to say he was ‘ cracked.^ 
 In 1859 — the year of the publication of Mr. 
 Darwin’s ‘ Origin of Species ’ — Dr. Falconer went 
 to see the collection of what M. de Perthes called 
 his ‘human implements;’ and then persuaded 
 Evans and Prestwich to go to the valley of the 
 Somme, and give the matter their consideration. 
 Although they were by no means very enthusi- 
 astic believers in M. de Perthes’ theory, it seems 
 that they induced Lyell, Murchison, Lubbock, 
 and others, to follow, and examine the beds on 
 the Somme where these ‘implements ’ were found. 
 The search soon began in England, and an abun- 
 
ABUNDANCE OF THE FLINTS. 
 
 173 
 
 dance of these split or chipped flints were found in 
 the Isle of Ely, and all over the Eastern Coun- 
 ties, in Bedfordshire, Hampshire, and the Isle of 
 Wight, and in Cornwall. 
 
 Be it understood, that, in all these cases, the 
 chipped or split flints were always rough ; they were 
 never polished. That the polished flints exhibited 
 in our museums are of human workmanship, no 
 man thinks of doubting ; but — except the people 
 who deny that there is any proof of contrivance 
 in an eye or a limb — nobody imagines it to be so 
 very palpably and pellucidly clear that countless 
 split flints found in the ground, or on the ground, 
 must have been split by human hands. I must 
 confess, my friends, that it seems to me to be 
 one of the queerest facts ever met with, that our 
 ‘ grand top-sawyers ’ in Science should insist, so 
 valorously, that Mind has been employed in 
 making what they insist on calling ‘flint imple- 
 ments.’ and yet they cannot discern that Mind is 
 traceable in the formation of the human hand, or 
 eye. 
 
 Mr. Whitley, a surveyor, living in the neigh- 
 bourhood of Truro, and a practical geologist, has 
 
174 
 
 SIR JOHN Lubbock’s theory. 
 
 been protesting against this craze of our leading 
 geologists, for the last dozen years or more. In 
 1865, he issued a pamphlet exposing the false 
 reasonings and conclusions of Sir Charles Lyell 
 and Professor Ramsay, and others, respecting the 
 ‘Antiquity of Man,’ drawn from these chipped or 
 split flints. In 1874, he was at a meeting of the 
 Victoria Institute in London, and in the presence 
 of several scientific men, again exposed their mis 
 taken conclusions j and last year, the Victoria 
 Institute issued ‘ A Critical Examination of the 
 Flints from Brixham Cavern, by N. Whitley, C.E., 
 in which the same author has shown up the in- 
 fatuation of men of science respecting the ‘ humaR 
 implements ’ said to have been found in tha) 
 cavern in 1858 and 1859. 
 
 Sir John Lubbock has published an imposing, 
 big book, to establish what he fondly considers to 
 have been the ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’ 
 Ages, as well as the Bronze and Iron Ages of 
 Man. But the American geologists are already 
 proclaiming that they see no truth in Sir John’s 
 fanciful distinctions of ‘ Palaeolithic ' (or ancient 
 flint) and ‘Neolithic’ (or modern flint) Ages of 
 
COUNTLESS MILLIONS OF FLINTS. 
 
 175 
 
 Man. That ancient men used sharpened flints, 
 nobody doubts. The wife of Moses, and also 
 Joshua, used ‘knives of flints’ for the rite of 
 circumcision. And we cannot wonder at this. 
 The split flints are so numerous in the Arabian 
 Desert, that a part of it is called ‘ the Desert of 
 Flints;’ and the most intelligent travellers hold 
 that these abundant flints are split by the change 
 of temperature. In those countries, it is often 
 piercingly cold, when you awake in the morning ; 
 and by high noon, the fierce sun peels the skin 
 off your face. 
 
 These split or chipped flints have not only been 
 found by millions in our own country, but they 
 are found in France and almost all over Europe, 
 in India, in Australia, in Terra del Fuego, in 
 Japan, in Palestine, in Algiers, on the great 
 Sahara, on the Libyan desert, and “ on the sterile 
 terraces and slopes which border the Nile, but 
 not on its alluvial soil,” says Mr. Whitley. The 
 common-sense question is. Where did all the 
 men come from, who, according to Professor 
 Ramsay, and Sir Charles Lyell, and Sir John 
 1 ul bock, must have lived so many thousands of 
 
176 FOOLISH FANCIES OF GEOLOGISTS. 
 
 years ago, and fashioned so queerly these millions 
 of millions of flints which nobody could imagine 
 were fashioned at all, by man — except somebody 
 who ‘ had a soft place in their head,’ as they say 
 in Yorkshire? The high scientific people call 
 these chipped flints and gravels ‘arrow-heads and 
 spear-heads and knives ; ’ but when you look at 
 many of them, you cannot help thinking that these 
 same high scientific people must have very strange 
 notions of tools. 
 
 One of the most conclusive facts that have been 
 brought to bear against the truth of this wild theory 
 of the Flints, is — that when they are put into a 
 stone-breaker, the flints come out of the very forms 
 and shapes which our geological Solomons call 
 ‘knives, and spearheads and arrow-heads.’ Mr. 
 Whitley has shown this. “A flake,” says he, “is 
 the result of the natural fracture of the flint, and 
 a nodule of flint mechanically crushed by a stone- 
 breaker produces as perfect flakes as are now re- 
 ferred to human workmanship.” 
 
 When Keltic tumuli are opened, it is usual to 
 find some chipped flints with the rude bronze tools 
 and pottery which accompany human remains. 
 
WHAT ANCIENT SKULLS PROVE. 
 
 177 
 
 No one can doubt that ancient men made some 
 use of split flints ; but to assert that wherever the 
 split flints are found there men must have lived, is 
 ‘‘quite another thing,” as we say. Why are not 
 petrifactions of the men found with the millions of 
 flints, if men did split and chip them ? They have 
 been collecting these flints, and raving about them, 
 for years ; but no human petrifaction can be found 
 among them — although a new human jaw, placed 
 among the gravel by a grave-digger, deceived one 
 French enthusiast, in a ludicrous way. 
 
 Nor does the discovery of the human relics at 
 Engis, or Cro-Magnon, or Mentone, aid the high 
 scientific people in their attempt to discredit the 
 Bible account of the late introduction of Man, by 
 the Creator. Although they will have it that these 
 relics have been found in sites which prove a high 
 antiquity, nobody asserts that the skulls show we 
 are closely related to apes. Huxley himself says 
 the Engis skull might have been the skull of a 
 philosopher; and the other skulls are very large, 
 and the parts of skeletons found with them show 
 that the skulls must have been worn on the 
 shoulders of men more than six feet high. This 
 
178 
 
 THE MAMMOTH IN SIBERIA 
 
 cannot surprise us. The Bible assures us that 
 men of great stature lived in ancient times. Prin- 
 cipal Dawson contends that these may be relics of 
 antediluvian men. 
 
 Let it be observed, too, that so far from the 
 finding of a few chipped flints in caverns, along 
 with parts of the bones of the Mammoth, proving 
 a great antiquity, — the finding of a score, or one 
 hundred, perfect petrifactions of men, in the same 
 situation, ought not to lead us into the mistaken 
 conclusion that therefore the human petrifactions 
 must have lain there several thousand years. I 
 am talking to-night in the hearing, doubtless, of 
 many general readers, and some of you must be 
 amiliar with a fact which has been mentioned, 
 again and again, in various publications. The 
 body of a mammoth entire was reported to have 
 been seen by an English traveller, at the close of 
 the last century, on the fall of a mass of ice, on the 
 banks of the Lena, in Siberia. Mr. Adams, in 
 i8Ci3, went and found the mammoth. Part of its 
 body had been devoured by wolves, and the Yakut 
 hunters, who showed him the skeleton, informed 
 him that they had given some of the flesh to their 
 
MUST HAVE LIVED LATELY. 
 
 179 
 
 dogs. Such of its skin as remained was covered 
 with black bristles, thicker than horse-hair, with a 
 warm covering, underneath, of reddish wool and 
 hair. The skeleton of this animal is now in the 
 St. Petersburg museum. 
 
 Now I appeal to your common sense, — Can 
 you believe that wolves and dogs could eat flesh 
 which had been enclosed in ice for several thou- 
 sand years ? Can you believe they could eat it, 
 if it had been so enclosed one thousand years? I 
 confess to you that I cannot. My humble conclusion 
 is that mammoths were existing in Siberia not one 
 thousand years ago. Pallas, the great traveller, 
 obtained the body of a rhinoceros which had been 
 frozen up in the same manner. And when the 
 mass of thick hair was seen ^n the head and foot, 
 which were taken also to St. Petersburg, the be- 
 holders said it must have lived in Siberia, by its 
 clothing. I should say that some of these huge 
 animals not only lived there — being fitted by the 
 Almighty Maker for the climate — but it is not so 
 very long ago that they lived there. 
 
 There has, no doubt, been a most eager and 
 uneasy snatching at every straw which they ima- 
 
i8o 
 
 THE VICTORIA CAVE MISTAKE. 
 
 gined would support their long-age-of-man theory, 
 by leading geologists ; but they are, ever and anon, 
 found to be only straws, and no real supports. 
 The fibula of a man, which, it was triumphantly 
 proclaimed, had been found in the Victoria Cave, 
 near Settle, is now declared to be part of the leg 
 bone of a bear ! And so it has been with other 
 judgments pronounced in haste, at the dictate of 
 the will, and not of reason. 
 
 It is affirmed that the late creation of Man, 
 recorded in the Bible, does not afford time enough 
 for the growth of such civilisations as those of the 
 ancient Egyptians and Assyrians. I have not time 
 to go into such a question now; but I humbly 
 think, if you make the due inquiry for yourselves, 
 you will not come to that conclusion. 
 
CRAZY PEDIGREE OF MAN, 
 
 z8i 
 
 XIL 
 
 Haeckel’s pedigree of man : weakness and 
 
 FOLLY OF the DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 
 
 E must not merely consider Evolution as 
 
 » ^ the theory of Man’s origin — for Pro- 
 fessor Haeckel, the leading Evolutionist of Ger- 
 many, gives us our animal pedigree of twenty-twc 
 stages. 
 
 (i) Anthropoid or men, were evolved from the 
 (2) Pithecanihropoid or dumb ape-men ; and they 
 from the (3) AnthropoideSd or man-like apes 
 (gorilla, orang-outang, chimpanzee, etc.) ; and 
 they from the (4) Menocercad or tailed apes, or 
 monkeys; and they from the (5) ProsimicBd or half- 
 apes (Indris and Loris) ; and they from the 
 
 (6) Marsupialiad or kangaroos ; and they from the 
 
 (7) Pro-Mammalia (the duck-billed Platypus and 
 Echidna) ; and they from the (8) Protamniotad — 
 
i 82 
 
 OUR DESCENT FROM SHARKS. 
 
 (‘‘What they were like, I do not suppose any 
 one is in a position to say!’* says Huxley); and 
 they from the (9) Sozura, or half Amphibia ; and 
 they from the (10) true Amphibia; and they from 
 the (ii) Dipneicsta^ or Lepidosirens ; and they 
 from the (12) SelacMi] or Sharks. 
 
 “Mercy on us!” exclaims some one, “does 
 the man mean to tell us that we come out of 
 shajks ? ” 
 
 “ And what if he does ? ” cries another ; “ are 
 not some of us held to be sharks, still ? Are not 
 the lawyers called sharks ? ” 
 
 “ Why, yes,” says another, “but then, you know, 
 they are land-sharks, and Haeckel means water- 
 sharks ! ” 
 
 “ And what were the sharks developed from, 
 please? ” 
 
 Oh, from the (i^) Pfonorhina, or Lampreys; and 
 they from the (14) Acrania (represented by the 
 Amphioxus); and they from the (15) Chordoiiia 
 
 “Never heard of such a creature! ” cries some 
 one. 
 
 No — nor was it ever heard of, till Haeckel 
 said it 7 nust have existed — for the Ascidian must 
 
OUR 'earliest ancestor.’ 183 
 
 have come out of it, and the Ascidian must be ' one 
 of our ancestors ’ ! 
 
 ‘'And what did the Chordonia come out of, by 
 Evolution, or Development ? ” 
 
 From the (16) Solecida (some kind of Annelida, 
 or worms) ; and they from the (17) Archehninthes^ 
 or Turbellaria; and they from the (18) Gastrcea 
 (another imaginary creature, like the Chordoma) ; 
 and they from the (19) Planceada^ or ciliated 
 animalculae ; and they from the (20) compound 
 Arncebce ; and they from the (21) Simple Amxbce ; 
 
 and they from the (22) 
 
 “And what’s that, sir?” says some one. 
 
 Haeckel says that it is an ‘ albuminous com- 
 pound of carbon,’ and the earliest form of life ; — 
 that it begun to live in the Laurentian strata, by 
 spontaneous generation ; and that its acceptance 
 as our earliest ancestor is necessary ' on the most 
 Weighty general grounds ’ 1 
 
 “Have any petrifactions of the Pithecanthropoi^ 
 or dumb ape-men, ever been found ? ” some of 
 you will ask. 
 
 No ; but Haeckel sagely conjectures they will 
 be found some day^ in Afiica, or Southern Asia — 
 
184 
 
 DARWIN TALKING NONSENSE. 
 
 although he also conjectures that they dwelt chiefly 
 in Leimcria^ a continent which is now sunk — he 
 again conjectures — in the Indian ocean ! 
 
 If such be modern philosophy, am I wrong in 
 calling it philosophy-run-mad? 
 
 Mr. Darwin, and the rest, seem very meekly to 
 accept all this monstrous nonsense from the mighty 
 Haeckel; and Mr. Darwin also conjures us to 
 respect our ancestors ! 
 
 But are they coming after us ? — we cannot help 
 asking Mr. Darwin and his grand compeers in 
 '‘science' If Evolution be true, though the dumb 
 ape-men are no more, we ought to behold some 
 progress upwards in the race next below them. 
 What progress are they making — the Gorilla, and 
 Ourang, and Chimpanzee ? Do they approach 
 towards our human civilisation ? Where are their 
 houses — their towns— their cities ? Where are 
 their ships — their bridges — their railways ? Where 
 are their books — their libraries — their picture and 
 sculpture galleries ? Where are their arts and 
 sciences ? Which of the animals have they tamed 
 and domesticated ? 
 
 How dreary the answer ! “ They all remain in 
 
SPECIES REMAIN UNCHANGED. 185 
 
 their savagery, still ! ” One would think it should 
 silence these wild philosophers. But when men 
 set themselves to maintain a theory, how often 
 do we see that they are not moved even by 
 what they themselves confess to be the strongest 
 disproofs of their theory. It is a well-known fact 
 that animals of different species do not breed 
 together; or if, as in the instance of the horse 
 and ass, a hybrid (the mule) is produced, the 
 hybrids will not breed. So long as this remains a 
 fact, says Professor Huxley, so long Mr. Darwin’s 
 theory can only remain a theory I And yet Pro- 
 fessor Huxley proclaims himself an Evolutionist ! 
 
 Historic time has given us no proof of Evolu- 
 tion. Yonder, in old Egypt, are the pictures of 
 the camel, and the crocodile, and the hippopo- 
 tamus, and the ape and monkey, and other crea- 
 tures, — with the mummies of the ox, and cat, and 
 ibis, — and all show that there has been no evolution 
 in the instance of any of these animals, in several 
 thousand years. This was a fact on which the 
 illustrious Cuvier was wont to insist very strongly, 
 in his rejection of the Lamarckian doctrines. 
 
 And who, that thinks of the old Greeks, can 
 
 13 
 
l86 
 
 WE DO NOT EQUAL THE GREEKS. 
 
 assert there has been any evolution for Man ? We 
 are neither so fine a people physically, nor in 
 intelligence. When you remember their poetry, 
 and think of their Homer, and ^schylus, and 
 Sophocles, and a long list beside ; when you think 
 of their philosophy, and remember their Plato and 
 Aristotle, and a countless host of other names; 
 when you think of the art of government, and 
 remember their almost perfect Pericles ; when you 
 think of patriotism, and remember their Leonidas 
 and hundreds of other heroes ; when you think of 
 their marvellous sculpture, and remember that no 
 modern nation has ever approached it in excellence; 
 when you think of the perfect beauty of their 
 language, — who can fail to pronounce the old 
 Greeks the most matchless people that ever yet 
 existed? You will say, we know more than they 
 knew. Just so ; because we reap the knowledge 
 and the fruits of the experience of ages. But we 
 are not the equals of the old Greeks, as a people, 
 for all that. 
 
 There are some signs of this whimsical theory 
 of Evolution soon taking another phase. Carl 
 Vogt has given hints that perhaps they have, after 
 
WE KNOW NOT HOW GOD CREATES. 1 87 
 
 all, made a mistake as to the line of descent. It 
 may be found, he conjectures, that Man is not 
 descended from the Ape family, but from the 
 Dog! 
 
 Other theories may soon be heard of — for the 
 human mind is restless under the burthen of 
 mystery. Mystery seals up many a page of the 
 Bible to us, in this our imperfect state ; and mystery 
 surrounds us on every side in nature. The mystery 
 of our own existence — of the existence of our 
 race — the mystery of life — is felt to be intolerable 
 to some men. They are unwilling to receive the 
 doctrine of Creation by an Almighty Maker as a 
 solution. ‘‘You only answer us by another mys- 
 tery,^’ they exclaim ; “ Creation by an Almighty 
 Maker is a mystery,*^ or, as Herbert Spencer says, 
 it is unthinkable. 
 
 If by unthinkable he means incomprehensible, 
 our reply is — So it is in millions of cases : we 
 really comprehend nothing; and there are thou- 
 sands of facts we never dream of comprehending. 
 We shall never be able to comprehend how God 
 creates. We can only think of creation as the act 
 Almighty Will. The highest archangel can no 
 
r88 
 
 WE HOLD BY OUR FAITH 
 
 more comprehend it than we. If God exists, He 
 must be able to create : that is the beginning and 
 the end of it. 
 
 You and I are believers in God’s existence ; and 
 so we do not seek to pry into His method of 
 creation. The design and contrivance we discern 
 in Nature prove His wisdom to us. His endowment 
 of His creature Man, with attributes so superior to 
 the limited powers of brutes, renders us unwilling 
 to listen^^^^Ifer to the doctrine that we are 
 developed from the brutes/ or the dark doctrines 
 of Materialism and Anninilation, which are held, 
 also, by our modern philosophers. 
 
 We thank God that we are Christian men, and, 
 turning from the degrading proclamation of the 
 professedly wise r»en, that we are born of the 
 brutes, and shall {)erish like them, and be no more 
 for ever — we listen to the glorious words, I am 
 the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth 
 in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. 
 And he that liveth and believeth in me, shall nevei 
 die.” 
 
X X V X V X V X V X V x.| x xfx xt x x V y x V x V x^x x V x V X 
 
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 shall hear his voice and come forth ; they that have done good unto 
 the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the 
 resurrection of damnation.” — Extract. 
 
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 The Second Coming of CTirist, Considered in its 
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 i6mo. Cloth. 282 pages, go cents. 
 
 Hoping that it may be the means of saving some from falling 
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 The Organic Union of American Methodism. 
 
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 From the IMtchigan Christian Advocate, 
 
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 but the crystallization of years of observation and thought. 
 
 CRANSTON &, CURTS, Publishers, 
 
 C:E=CIC-^<3-0, ST. IjOTTIS. 
 
y xfvv .-^xyjx xJ^x ^ix xjxxixxjxxix xjx xjxxjx xjx xjxxixxjxxix'x 
 
 SEVEN GREAT LIGHTS. 
 
 By RKV. KKRR B. TUPPER, D. D. 
 
 1 2mo. Cloth. 1 88 pages ^ 75 cents. 
 
 Sketches of Luther, Cranmer, Knox, Weseey, 
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 Dr. W. E. McDowell, President of the University of Denver, 
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 CORNER WORK; Or, Look Up and Lift Up. 
 
 By MYRA GOODWIN PLANTZ. 
 
 i2mo. Cloth, p// pages, 75 cents. 
 
 ‘‘In the world of darkness. 
 
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 You in your small corner, 
 
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 day-school libraries and to the family library. — Religious Telescope. 
 
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