and continual Changes of the Earth. 203 



but such as it is, I now submit it to your consideration. Its ra~ 

 tio?iale is simple, accords with and sufficiently accounts for all 

 the geological phaenomena and facts we are in possession of; 

 and amongst the rest hitherto inscrutable, these immense 

 forests of vegetable remains laid prostrate and transformed 

 into beds of coal, covered over by and buried under millions 

 of acres of matter, in some places a hundred, in others a thou- 

 sand feet deep, accessible only by pick, wedge and hammer to 

 the miner, who brings up productions of past ages and warm 

 climes, as a substitute during winter for the absence of that 

 great luminary the sun, by whose agency they were originally 

 reared. But this is not all. In the slow, progressive and 

 equal whirl of the terrestrial ball, deposits of this kind have 

 been made at periods remotely distant from each other, as coal- 

 formations are often separated by strata, which must have 

 required thousands of years to collect and deposit. 



Nor is this theory destitute of support from analogical 

 reasoning. We see the earth, in her annual revolution round 

 the sun, alternately turning evei'y part of her surface to his 

 benign influence ; so much so, that on an average the poles 

 receive nearly as much light and heat in 365 days as the 

 equator. And why, to make all parts equal otherwise, may 



SHE NOT REVOLVE IN THIS WAY ALSO? 



All nature goes by revolutions, by production and repro- 

 duction : the death of one animal is the life of another. The 

 individual is the son of a day, — the species may be said to be 

 eternal. By the same parity of reasonmg, the moon also 

 changes her poles ; and, if we may credit our visual organs, 

 something very like a former pole still appears on her disk near 

 her lower limb, where the seas and land run more in stripes 

 pointing to it — something like our own Greenland, and other 

 northern isles, peaks, and pi'omontories, all which lie more 

 north and south than east and west, occasioned, perhaps, by 

 the tidal currents running more in that direction in the polar 

 regions than at the equator. 



We can judge of matters only as they present themselves to 

 our senses. Man also, like his fellow animals, is the creature 

 of but a day ; his observations of the forms and relative posi- 

 tions of the seas, waters, and mountains of the earth are ex- 

 tremely limited ; indeed, their changes are so slow that they 

 are often made before the operations were perceived. He can 

 with difficulty see even the hour hand's motion of a dial, and 

 how can he Ibllow the growth of the shell of a nut or of the 

 terraqueous globe ! 



Cc2 XLII. On 



