58 GEOLOGICAL SURVEY 
at their creation, and have been neither derived from improvement of a lower, nor lost by progres- 
sive development into a higher type.” 
And the same conclusion is true of the other groups. The gradation is not from one species to 
another, but a progression of classes, which was adapted to a corresponding progression in the state 
of the earth’s surface ; and although we cannot show what the actual condition of the inorganic 
world was, at the time of the introduction of each of these classes, we have every reason to believe 
the classes introduced were created with express adaptations to those conditions. 
We find everywhere among fossil groups of successive formations marks of adaptation to prece- 
ding conditions. Crustacea follow the fucoids upon which they fed; the voracious Sauroid fishes 
are introduced after a supply of food was prepared by the existence of other animals. Huge 
Reptiles next appear, which preyed upon these. Birds come into existence after the appearance of 
dry land, as indicated by land plants. Insects precede the Insectivora. Herbivorous animals 
appear still later, when plants were in number and kinds sufficient to afford them proper food, 
and are followed by carnivorous animals, which prey upon them. Last in the series man 
appears. 
Consistency of Modern Geology with the Mosaic account of the Creation.—When_ Geologists 
first announced the fact that deposits of great thickness, abounding in the remains of animals that 
once lived, existed in the earth’s crust, and that all this could not be explained on the supposition 
that the age of the earth was only 6,000 years, Geology was considered, for a while, as opposed to 
the Bible. 
Time was when Astronomy stood in the same relation ; and although it is now known that it is 
the motion of the earth and not that of the sun that produces the phenomena of day and night, yet 
no one thinks the authority of the Scriptures lessened, or has his belief disturbed by this—and for 
the simple reason that he knows that the Bible was intended to be a code of moral and religious 
laws, and not a text book of Astronomy. And this science is now properly regarded as the hand- 
maid of religion, in expanding and ennobling the mind, by elevated views of the Creator’s works. 
It is not to be supposed that Moses, in the account he gives of the creation, intended a system of 
chronology: his great object seems to be to impress his readers with the fundamental truths that 
the world was not eternal, but the work of the Almighty, and that man, like the rest, had a begin- 
ning—in a word, to show them how, and not when, the world was made. 
It must be borne in mind that the question is not between the facts of Geology and the credibility 
of the Mosaic Account of the Creation, but between those facts and the literal interpretation of that 
account. 
It is acknowledged on all hands that the deposition of strata of rocks six or seven miles in thick- 
ness, containing organic remains, must have occupied, according to all the laws governing matter, 
an immensely great period of time. It was usual, at one time, to refer the phenomenon of the 
distribution of organic remains in these rocks to the Deluge; but no one, who has ever examined a 
fossiliferous deposit for five minutes, can hold such an opinion. ‘The manner in which fossil shells 
are embedded shows most conclusively that the animals to which they belonged lived and died 
where we find them, and that they could not have been disturbed by the waters of a deluge. 
There are, I believe, those who suppose that the world is not the result of a long continued series 
