consistent with the Mosaic History. 39 
In the above table, we have not taken advantage of the distinction 
which, we conceive, we have gone far to prove, is expressed in the 
Hebrew text between the cryptogamous and the other classes of 
plants, but have set down the whole vegetable kingdom as forming 
only one element in the table. We shall also allow that the 4th, 5th, 
and 6th Nos. may be liable to be interchanged among themselves, in 
respect of place, and shall hinge no argument upon them, farther 
than what arises from the circumstance that they are all placed in 
one group. Yet, after these abatements from the number of par- 
ticulars, the coincidences here shown between the order of the epochs 
of creation assigned in Genesis, and that discovered by geology, are 
calculated to excite the deepest attention. Human science, in the 
probability of chances, as illustrated by La Place, has put us in pos- 
session of an instrument for estimating their value; and we feel am- 
ply entitled to take advantage of it for that purpose, for no case could 
well be pointed out, where it would be more correctly applicable than 
in this, where the coincidences assume a definitely successive numer- 
ical form. We are entitled to adopt even the very language of La 
Place, and to say, “ By subjecting the probability of these coinci- 
dences to computation, it is found that there 3 is more than sixty thou- 
sand to #} ee f 4 teen f in ne 
It is thus, ‘then, that the discoveries of geology, when more ma~ 
tured instead of throwing suspicion on the truths of revelation, as the 
first steps in them led some persons to maintain, have furnished the 
most overpowering evidence in behalf of one branch of these truths. 
The result of these discoveries has been in this respect similar to 
those of the Chinese and Egyptian histories, and the Indian astrono- 
my, but much more striking. Eminent men had pledged their fame 
in setting up these histories, and that astronomy, in opposition to the 
chronology of Genesis; but further and more careful inquiry into 
their true characters, jucentied that, when rightly understood, they 
only tend to confirm it. 
We are not afraid that we shall have here quoted iui us the 
words of Bacon, “Tanto magis hec vanitas inhibenda venit, et co- 
ercenda, quia ex divinorum et humanorum, male sana admixtione, 
non solum educitur, philosophia phantastica, sed etiam religio hereti- 
ca.” We have only endeavored to illustrate and point out the con- 
sequences of the statement of Baron Cuvier, that, the order which 
* Syst. du Meith, book v, chap. 6. 
