SACRED HISTORY OF THE EARTH. 323 



fi'equent interruption of that repose. At several different periods 

 violent commotions and disruptions have taken place. The Old 

 and the New Red Sandstone contain conglomerates of rolled peb- 

 bles of various rocks, and the upper surface of the Chalk has been 

 jected to a violent action. Other circumstances, too, denote 

 anything rather than an uniform course of nature throughout the 

 secondary series. We find a race of land plants springing up 

 repeatedly between the deposition of the oldest and the most recent 

 strata, flourishing for a time, but soon making way for the marine 

 deposits of which the greater part of the strata consist. Nor have 

 these marine deposits been uniform and unchanging in their 

 nature. We find that the sea has at various times deposited on the 

 same spot every possible variety of sand, gravel, clay, chalk, oolite, 

 and marble, at one time stocked to repletion with animal life, 

 at other times destitute of every vestige of it. These facts appear 

 to be quite irreconcileable with the appearances which would be 

 presented by an uninterrupted course of nature during 16 or 17 

 centuries from the Creation to the Deluge. 



Further, the space of sixteen centuries is far too short for the 

 deposition of strata of the enormous thickness which we find in the 

 secondary and tertiary formations. The total thickness of these 

 strata, on a very moderate calculation, is not less than 18,000 feet 

 of perpendicular height. Now there is no reason to suppose that 

 the antediluvian sea formed its deposits with greater rapidity than 

 the sea does at present, since in the period from Adam to Noah, 

 we find no record of the laws of nature having differed from what 

 they have been ever since the Deluge. But did the sea now form 

 deposits at the rate of 18,000 feet in 1600 years, the Mediterranean 

 would have been filled up since the time when Ulysses navigated 

 it, and we should hear of ships running upon shoals where a feW 

 years before there had been no soundings. It seems then to be 

 quite incompatible with the phenomena of the secondary and 

 tertiary strata to assign their deposition to the sixteen centuries 

 which intervened from the Mosaic Creation to the Deluge. 



We shall now attempt to shew that although the secondary 

 strata bear traces of having occupied hundreds, perhaps thousands 

 of centuries in their deposition, yet that such an hypothesis is not 

 contrary to the Mosaic account, but is merely something super- 

 added to it. Persons are continually forgetting what has been so 

 often urged by divines and philosophers, that the writings of Moses 

 refer solely to the moral history of mankind, and not to the physical 

 history of the earth. The account of the Creation is therefore 

 exceedingly short and concise, given merely as a necessary intro- 

 duction to the history of man. If we wish to learn more concern- 

 ing the Creation than Moses has told us, we must read it in the 

 book of Nature. 



Mr. Turner himself admits, (p. 465,) from the words of Moses; 

 that the earth existed " without form and void," for an indefinite 

 period before the first day of Creation. And it is to this indefinite 

 period, concerning which Moses has said nothing, that most geolo- 



