agree with Modern Geology ? 73 



In the above Table, we have not taken advantage of the dis- 

 tinction which, we conceive, we have gone far to prove, is ex- 

 pressed in the Hebrew text between the cryptogamous and the 

 other classes of plants, but have set down the whole vegetable 

 kingdom as forming only one element in the table. We shall 

 also allow that the 4th, 5th, and 6th Nos. may be liable to be 

 interchanged among themselves, in respect of place, and shall 

 hinge no argument upon them, farther than what arises from 

 the circumstance that they are all placed in one group. Yet, 

 after these abatements from the number of particulars, the 

 coincidences here shewn between the order of the epochs of 

 creation assigned in Genesis, and that discovered by geology, 

 are calculated to excite the deepest attention. Human science, 

 in the probabihty of chances, as illustrated by La Place, has put 

 us in possession of an instrument for estimating their value ; and 

 we feel amply entitled to take advantage of it for that purpose, 

 for no case could well be pointed out, where it would be more 

 correctly applicable than in this, where the coincidences assume 

 a definitely successive numerical form. We are entitled to 

 adopt even the very language of Laplace, and to say, " By 

 subjecting the probabihty of these coincidences to computation, 

 it is found that there is more than sixty thousand to one against 

 the hypothesis that they are the effect of chance *."" 



It is thus, then, that the discoveries of geology, when more 

 matured, instead of throwing suspicion on the truths of revela- 

 tion, as the first steps in them led some persons to maintain, 

 have furnished the most overpowering evidence in behalf of 

 one branch of these truths. The result of these discoveries has 

 been in this respect similar to those of the Chinese and Egyp- 

 tian histories, and the Indian astronomy, but much more strik- 

 ing. Eminent men had pledged their fame in setting up these 

 histories, and that astronomy, in opposition to the chronology 

 of Genesis; but further and more careful inquiry into their 

 true characters, discovered that, when rightly understood, they 

 only tend to confirm it. 



We are not afraid that we shall have here quoted against us the 

 words of Bacon, " Tanto magis haec vanitas inhibenda venit, et 



• Syst. du Monde, book v. chap. 6. 



