256 Fair-holme's General View of 



a union cannot take place in geology, any more than in as- 

 tronomy. We were in hopes that the severe castigation which 

 the Rev. A. Sedgwick, Woodwardian professor of Cambridge, 

 had given to those who thus endeavoured to clog the progress 

 of discovery with their own crude notions of the sacred 

 writings had, for some time at least, put an end to any further 

 attempts of this kind : in this we have been disappointed. 

 We cannot forbear, however, quoting the following passage 

 from his address : — " Laws for the government of intellectual 

 beings, and laws by which material things are held together, 

 have not one common element to connect them ; and to seek 

 for an exposition of the phenomena of the natural world 

 among the records of the moral destinies of mankind, would 

 be as unwise as to look for rules of moral government among 

 the laws of chemical combination. . . . No opinion can be 

 heretical but that which is not true." (Address to the Geo- 

 logical Society, 1830.) Most of the writers w T ho have 

 attempted this unnatural combination have possessed little 

 real knowledge of geology, and the author of the work we are 

 about to notice is not an exception : his chief authorities are 

 quotations from the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, written by some 

 one who appears to have as little practical acquaintance with 

 the science as himself. The argument has been spread out 

 by these writers over a vast space, and connected with a 

 variety of subjects : they may be truly said, with Job, "to darken 

 counsel by words without knowledge." We trust, however, w r e 

 can spare the time of our readers, and present them with the 

 main bearings of the question at issue in a small compass. Mr. 

 Fairholme lays down as an axiom, that we are bound to con- 

 sider the sacred Scriptures as infallible in every point. He then 

 asserts that the world was created in six literal days, of 

 twenty-four hours' length. Here, however, the literal scrip- 

 tural geologists encounter a difficulty. The secondary and 

 tertiary strata, to the depth of 20,000 ft. in the aggregates 

 contain remains of myriads of animals of different orders and 

 species, some of which evidently lived and died where their 

 remains are found. It does not therefore appear probable 

 that all these numerous tribes of animals could have lived and 

 perished in six literal days. To explain this, Mr. Fairholme 

 and other writers of the same school assert that, at the time 

 of the Noachian deluge, the old continent on which Noah and 

 the antediluvians lived sunk under the ocean ; and the ancient 

 bed of the ocean was raised up, and became dry land. The 

 strata of this new land are supposed by them to have been 

 filled with the organic remains deposited in the ancient sea 

 between the epoch of creation and that of the deluge. There 



