LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. 291 



seems more and more to verify, carries back the origin about six thousand 

 years, 



*' Geology — not the fancies of speculative man, but in modern times become 

 a true science, a record of established facts, presents us with the grand memo- 

 rials of even a more distant time. It shews the remains of a time when no life 

 existed on this globe ; when the light of morning awoke no human eye, 

 summoned no human being to toil or to pleasure, called forth no gladness on 

 the earth, and when the evening declined without one human being to regret the 

 departure of the day. 



" Subsequent strata exhibit the signs of the lowest orders of animal existence, 

 struggling against the first desolation of nature. 



** Immense deposits of a vegetable origin follow ; the forests of an unknown 

 time, in the carbonised remains of which are found impressions of various 

 plants which appear to have flourished when the heat of this planet was greater 

 than man's traditions acknowledge, and the place of this island was perhaps 

 then a sea. 



*' Amphibious and gigantic animals are found in strata less ancient than these 

 beds of coal : less ancient than marine deposits which cover the coal itself ; 

 animals which appear to have lived when the surface of large portions of the 

 earth was oozy marsh, unfit for man's habitation. 



** Still ascending towards the aera of man's creation, we trace alternate 

 deposits of marine and terrestrial relics, all of an unrecorded time ; and 

 it seems not to have been until after many of these revolutions that terrestrial 

 quadrupeds were created ; amidst the abundant remains of which, are discerned 

 at first none of the species now existing, all being apparently destroyed by 

 deluges of which superjacent marine remains furnish evidence. 



** At length we reach the surface of the habitable earth, and only to find that 

 it is the mere surface alone which belongs to man's recent history ; for that not 

 only are the most ancient formations often found forming the surface, or even 

 lofty mountains ; but that even below the most level and undisturbed plains, 

 there lie, often only a foot or two below the ground on which we tread, the 

 stupendous ruins effected by that great and universal deluge of which every 

 nation has a tradition, and many of the particulars of which are given to us by 

 Moses, the earliest writer of the earth whose works remain. Amidst these 

 ruins — accumulations of sand and clay and stony fragments brought from 

 distant hills by the force of waters, — we find the remains of the mastodon, the 

 elephant, the rhinoceros, the horse, the deer, the ox, the megatherium, the 

 hippopotamus, the hyaena, and many other animals. Of all these, it is observ- 

 able, that where the same kind of animal is yet known, the species is yet a little 

 different from that found in these strata left by the deluge ; and further, that 

 many animals seem at that time to have existed where they are now unknown ; — 

 the elephant, and hippopotamus, and also the hyaena, for instance, in this 

 island, if we may speak of it as an island at such a time ; but certainly in this 

 latitude, perhaps on the shores of what are now the fertile vallies of Worcester- 

 shire, — some of the animals are quite extinct, as the megatherium and masto- 

 don, and seem not to have survived the deluge in any part of the earth. 



" It is unquestionable, although no remains of man or of the species of animals 

 preserved with him have been found in these diluvial strata, that man existed before 

 the deluge which created them ; and that they were formed by the great catastrophe 

 which his history distinctly records. 



" Subsequent to those strata, all is of the recent earth ; all remains found are of 

 animals now existing, of species now common, in countries where they are now 

 known ; and which all the remains of antiquity (pictures, mummies, &c.,) shew to 

 have been coeval with the present race of mankind. 



" Between the desolate periods of which the ammonite, the encrinite, the trilobite, 

 and subsequently the great Saurian reptiles, are the attestations, — between those 

 times and the time of the great deluge, but possibly anterior to other convulsions 

 and deluges of a partial character — when the existence of plants, birds, and herbivo- 

 rous quadrupeds attests that man might exist on the globe, the first creation of a 

 human being must have had place. 



" The station which man holds makes it not presumptuous to look upon all this 



