72 THE RECORD. 



compose the rocky strata of the globe; the marls of onr 

 lakes, the shell-beds of our estuaries, and the coral-reefs of 

 existing seas, year after year increasing and hardening, be- 

 long to the same series of materials, and in process of time 

 will be indistinguishable from the chalks, and limestones, 

 and marbles we quarry ; the peat mosses and jungle growth, 

 and the vegetable drift that have grown and collected within 

 the history of man, are but continuations of the same forma- 

 tive power that gave rise to the lignites and coals of the 

 miner ; the molten lavas of ./Etna and Vesuvius, and the 

 cinders and ashes of Hecla, are but repetitions of the same 

 materials which now compose the basalts and greenstones 

 and trap-tuffs of the hills around us ; the corals, and shells, 

 and fishes, the fragments of plants, and the skeletons of 

 quadrupeds, now imbedded in the mud of our lakes and 

 estuaries and seas, will one day or other be converted into 

 stone, and tell as marvellous a tale as the fossils we now 

 exhume with such interest and admiration." Without this 

 uniformity in the great operations of nature, our reasonings 

 would be baseless, our conclusions a dream. We can only 

 read the Past as connected with the Present, and premise 

 of the Future from what is now taking place around us. 



Destroy this belief in the continuous operation of natural 

 law* and appeal to "revolutions" and "cataclysms," and 

 you present a world of disorder, a Creator without a plan, 

 and the human reason striving in vain to elaborate a system 

 from phenomena over which no system prevails. Establish 

 this belief, and the geologist feels he is dealing with a pre- 

 scient plan whose past ever bears certain appreciable rela- 

 tions to its present ; and in tracing the development of that 

 plan, he is animated by the high hope of ultimately attain- 

 ing to some conception, however faint, of the divine idea of 

 its Creator. And it is in this spirit of procedure that he 

 has subdivided the strata of the earth's crust into "sys- 



