786 GEOLOGY. 



Death introduced, through fierce antipathy ; 

 Beast now with beast 'gan war, and fowl with fowl, 

 And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving, 

 Devour'd each other ; nor stood much in awe 

 Of man, but fled him ; or with countenance grim 

 Glared on him passing." 



It may be well to glance at the difficulties necessarily connected with the hypothesis, that 

 the subjection of the animal creation to the law of death is an accident that befell it in 

 consequence of the sin of man, and formed no part of the Creator's original design. 

 Examining the anatomical construction of the carnivorous races, the demonstration is 

 complete, that they are organically adapted to prey upon each other, or subsist upon animal 

 food. The lion has his canine teeth, claws and juices for digesting the fleshy material 

 upon which he feeds, with instincts to direct him to it ; and are we to suppose that this 

 apparatus was originally given him without an office to perform ? or that it was an altera 

 tion subsequently introduced ? in fact, that he never became in reality a lion until some 

 time after his formation ? The microscope has enabled us to detect animalcules, invisible 

 to the naked eye, existing in myriad swarms upon leaves, grasses, and in drops of water ; 

 and were these created before the event of human delinquency, or not till afterwards? 

 The supposition that death came into the animal kingdom at that era, necessarily involves 

 the fact, that the numerous families of invisible animalcules were parts of a subsequent 

 creation, for beforehand the herbivorous quadrupeds must have destroyed them by whole 

 sale, in walking the earth, or feeding on its plants. But it would be easy to show, that 

 the law of death in the animal creation is a necessary adjunct of the law of reproduction, 

 for without the regular removal of one generation of the species after another, the universal 

 ruin of the whole would ensue, through failing nutrition. Revelation is not opposed to 

 geology upon the point in question, for those passages of the former which treat of the 

 sentence of death involve no other doctrine than that of its application to man, and it has 

 been very justly remarked, that man being threatened with death as the penalty of 

 disobedience, seems very clearly to imply a knowledge on his part of the nature of the 

 event, or the means of acquiring it by observation. 



Another general conclusion established by the ancient flora and fauna of the earth, is 

 the former prevalence of a high temperature in northern latitudes, perhaps amounting to an 

 ultra-tropical climate, or one warmer than at present exists upon the globe. The bones 

 of the mammoth occurring in such profusion along the shores of the arctic ocean, and the 

 banks of adjacent rivers, the Obi, Yenesi, and Lena ; the remains of extinct species of the 

 elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lion, tiger, and hyaena, scattered through the diluvium 

 of almost every part of Europe, the existing genera being confined almost exclusively to 

 regions within the tropics ; the abundance of shells in the tertiaries of northern countries, 

 the analogues of which are now found in tropical seas ; the extraordinary development 

 both of the animals and plants of the secondary rocks, compared with that of living 

 organic beings of a similar kind ; the tropical character of the flora of the coal formation, 

 distributed around Baffin's Bay, and even as far north as Melville island ; these are the 

 leading facts for which it is impossible to account, but upon the assumption, that in early 

 times the climate of the temperate and arctic zones possessed a temperature as elevated as 

 that of equatorial latitudes in the present day, and probably more elevated, since the 

 arborescent ferns, palms, equiseta, and lycopodiaceas of the carboniferous era are much 

 larger than their existing tropical analogues. When we consider that all the un stratified 

 rocks, the oldest granites, have evidently been in a melted state, and that the primary 

 stratified formations have either been entirely fused, or so highly heated as to be able to 

 assume a crystalline arrangement, the hypothesis of a globe cooling down gradually from 

 a condition of igneous fluidity commends itself to attention ; and if this be admitted, we 



