733 



risen molten from below, pass on to the old red sandstone, and 

 examine its significant platforms of violent death, — its faults, dis- 

 placements, and dislocations ; see, next, in the coal measures, those 

 evidences of sinking and ever-sinking strata, for thousands of feet to- 

 gether; mark in the oolite those vast over-lying masses of trap, 

 stretching athwart the landscape, far as the eye can reach ; observe 

 carefully how the signs of convulsion and catastrophe gradually lessen 

 as we descend to the times of the tertiary, though even in these ages 

 of the mammiferous quadruped, the earth must have had its oft-re- 

 curring ague fits of frightful intensity ; and then, on closing the sur- 

 vey, consider how exceedingly partial and unfrequent these earth - 

 tempests have become in the recent periods. Yes ; we find every- 

 where marks of at once progression and identity, — of progress made, 

 and yet identity maintained ; but it is in the habitation that we find 

 them, — not in the inhabitant." — p. 286. 



The author, in continuation of this interesting subject, here adduces 

 examples of vast tracts of country inundated by overflows of once li- 

 quid trap rock to the depth of several hundred feet, as occurring in 

 Hindustan, in southern Africa, and even, though on a far more limited 

 scale, in Scotland ; and asks, 



" What could man have done on the globe at a time when such 

 outbursts were comparatively common occurrences ? What could he 

 have done where Edinburgh now stands during that overflow of trap 

 porphyry of which the Pentland range forms but a fragment, or that 

 outburst of greenstone of which but a portion remains in the dark 

 ponderous coping of Salisbury Craigs, or when the thick floor of rock 

 on which the city stands was broken up, like the ice of an arctic sea 

 during a tempest in spring, and laid on edge from where it leans 

 against the Castle Hill to beyond the quarries at Joppa ? The rea- 

 soning brain would have been wholly at fault in a scene of things in 

 which it could neither foresee the exterminating calamity while yet 

 distant, nor control it when it had come ; and so the reasoning brain 

 was not produced until the scene had undergone a slow but thorough 

 process of change, during which, at each progressive stage, it had fur- 

 nished a platform for higher and still higher life. When the Coniferse 

 could flourish on the land, and fishes subsist in the seas, fishes and 

 cone-bearing plants were created ; when the earth became a fit habi- 

 tat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced ; with the 

 dawn of a more stable and mature state of things the sagacious quad- 

 ruped was ushered in ; and, last of all, when man's house was fully 

 prepared for him, — when the data on which it is his nature to reason 



