102 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS RESPECTING 



phenomena of cleavage have, with the aid of electricity, been 

 simulated on a small scale, and by the same agent crystals are 

 formed. In short, the remark which was made regarding the 

 indifference of the cosmical laws to the scale on which they 

 operated, is to be repeated regarding the geological. A com- 

 mon furnace will sometimes exemplify the operation of forces 

 which have been concerned in the production of a Giant's 

 Causeway ; and in a sloping ploughed field after rain, we may 

 often observe, at the lower end of a furrow, a handful of 

 washed and neatly deposited mud or sand, capable of serving 

 as an illustration of the way in which Nature has produced 

 the deltas of the Nile and Ganges. In the ripple-mark on 

 sandy beaches of the present day, we see Nature's exact repe- 

 tition of the operations by which she impressed similar features 

 on the sandstones of the carbonigenous era. Even such marks 

 as wind-slanted rain would in our day produce on tide-deserted 

 sands, have been read upon tablets of the ancient strata. It 

 is the same Nature that is to say, God through or in the 

 manner of nature working everywhere and in all time, causing 

 the wind to blow, and the rain to fall, and the tide to ebb and 

 flow, inconceivable ages before the birth of our race, as now. 

 So also we learn from the conifers of those old ages, that there 

 were winter and summer upon earth, before any of us lived to 

 liken the one to all that is genial in our own nature, or to say 

 that the other breathed no airs so unkind as man's ingratitude. 

 Let no one suppose there is any necessary disrespect for the 

 Creator in thus tracing his laws in their minute and familiar 

 operations. There is in reality no true great and small, grand 

 and familiar, in nature. Such only appear, when we thrust 

 ourselves in as a point from which to start in judging. Let 

 us pass, if possible, beyond immediate impressions, and see all 

 in relation to Cause, and we shall chastenedly admit that the 

 whole is alike worshipful. 



The Creator, then, is seen to have formed our earth, and 

 effected upon it a long and complicated series of changes, in the 

 same manner in which we find that he conducts the affairs of 

 nature before our living eyes : that is, in the manner of natural 

 law. This is no rash or unauthorized affirmation. It is what 

 we deduce from the calculations of a Newton and a Laplace, on 

 the one hand ; and from the industrious observation of facts 

 by a Murchison and a Lyell, on the other. It is a point of 

 stupendous importance in human knowledge ; here at once is 

 the whole region of the inorganic taken out of the dominion 



