Wellington Philosophical Society. 645 



gradually cooled ; then water condensed on its surface and 

 settled in the hollows caused by contraction, and so began the 

 great series of wearings-down by atmospheric agency, depo- 

 sition of aqueous strata, upheavals, depressions, crumplings, 

 and crushings which have moulded our earth through long 

 ages into its present condition of mountains, hills, valleys, 

 plains, seas, lakes, rivers. Then plant-life in water and on 

 land first appears. Very dim are the records of plant-life in 

 the earliest gneiss rocks of the Laurentian beds. They are in 

 the form of grajDhite, in which only the faintest traces of 

 organic structure have yet been discovered. But in the later 

 "old red sandstone," and in the great "Carboniferous" strata, 

 the evidences are clear and full of the growth of a compara- 

 tively low type of plants in most luxuriant abundance, and 

 under conditions apparently of obscured skies and a steamy 

 atmosphere. Some traces of low types of animal life in 

 crustaceans, molluscs, and fish are also found in these strata ; 

 but the salient feature of this period is plant-life. I imagine 

 that the description of the third day in Genesis refers to this 

 period, which also covers the fourth day, during which the sky 

 became less obscured by clouds, and the superabundant car- 

 bonic-acid gas was used up by plants, fitting the world for 

 higher forms of life, and that, as plant-life was not to be 

 referred to again in the notices of the subsequent days' work, 

 the higher orders of plants which had not yet appeared, but 

 w^hich were to grow afterwards, were also mentioned at this 

 time, as it were prophetically, or as being, according to evolu- 

 tionary theory, potentially existing in the earlier forms. I do 

 not think that this view can be considered as one which unduly 

 strains the meaning of the original. It professes to be a Divine 

 revelation, and, if it be in the form, as we suppose, of a series 

 of visions, intended to explain in a general way hovv our earth 

 and its inhabitants were brought into being, it seeius probable 

 that, as each successive advance in the scale of life was shown, 

 its final as well as its earlier types would appear in the vision, 

 and so each vision would be in some measure prophetic of what 

 was to be afterwards. I have already avowed my conviction 

 that in some sense there is a deep truth in the idea of evolu- 

 tion, and the view I have suggested as to the probable meaning 

 of the enumeration of the higher as well as of the lower orders 

 of plant-life in the creation of the third day is in accordance 

 with the view of evolution which supposes that in certain life- 

 germs there are potentialities of development in, it may be, a 

 number of upward directions, which in course of time and in 

 appropriate environments are accomplished ; and so new 

 varieties — it may be, new species and even genera — have been 

 evolved. This period of intense activity of plant-life is fol- 

 lowed by a pause or partial cessation of life-activity during the 



