Mineral and Mosaical Geologies. 113 



Wernerian, or vitrification to the Huttonian, in examining a 

 fragment of primitive rock, are exactly of the same authority, 

 but not of a particle more, with that which would have sug- 

 gested ossification and lignification to the anatomist and natu- 

 ralist, who should unknowingly have inspected or analyzed 

 created hone or created wood" — and all would be equally in 

 error, in concluding them to have been respectively formed by 

 the modes of crystallization, ossification, and lignification. 

 •' The mineralogist can no more discover the mode of the for- 

 mation of primitive rock by the laws of general chemistry" — 

 " than the anatomist can dist'over the mode of the formation of 

 created bone, by the laws of generation and accretion." 



Concluding, then, with Newton, that " God at the beginning 

 formed all material things" of such " figures and properties as 

 most conduced to the end for which he formed them, we per- 

 ceive that there must have been a first-forraed created man, as 

 certainly as there has since been a succession of generated 

 men ; and that it is most consistent with the notion of an intel- 

 ligent agent, and therefore most philosophical, to suppose that 

 he created that first man with the perfection of mind and body 

 which most conduced to the end for which he formed him" — 

 and the same argument is equally applicable to all other first 

 created animals, and every first created individual of the vege- 

 table kingdom. As, therefore, in two parts out of three of the 

 tripartite system of matter, we have ample ground to conclude, 

 «* That the first formations must have been produced in their 

 full perfection, perfect bone and perfect wood" we must infer, 

 from every principle of sound analogy, that in the third part, 

 " where the first formations were as essential to the structure 

 of the globe, as in the two former to the structure of their re- 

 spective systems, the first formations were likewise produced in 

 their full perfection, perfect rock — and we have seen that sen- 

 sible phenomena can have no authority whatever in this question." 



The fatuity of the analogies by which the mineral geology 

 attempts to support its darling chaos, and the absurdity of in- 

 ferring, from the slow progress of generated beings to matu- 

 rity, the slow progress of the earth from a state of confusion to 

 its present form, is next forcibly demonstrated, and Deluc's 

 trash about mountains and pyramids ridiculed as it deserves 

 to be. 



Equally absurd is the attempt to find secondary causes for 

 first-formed, created things. Of this class are the speculations 

 concerning the agents by which the mineral geology supposes 

 primitive rocks to have been held in solution. To prove the 

 legitimate relation between cause and effect, either the cause 

 must be known in the course of actual operation, or the eflPect 

 in the course of actual production ; and who ever knew a gra- 

 nite rock in course of actual production, or a menstruum ex- 



