IN ITS EMBRYONIC STATE. 25o 



them : and on his discoveries and his reasonings, compelled 

 by the inexorable laws of his mental constitution, did he 

 build up certain deductive beliefs, which had no previous ex- 

 istence in his mind. His convictions were consequents, not 

 antecedents. Such, also, is the character of geological disco- 

 very and inference, and of the existing belief, — their joint 

 production, — regarding the great antiquity of the globe. No 

 geologist worthy of the name began with the belief, and then 

 set himself to square geological phenomena with its require- 

 ments. It is a deduction, — a result j — not the starting as- 

 sumption, or given sum, in a process of calculation, but its 

 ultimate finding or answer. Clergymen of the orthodox 

 Churches, such as the Sumners, Sedgwicks, Bucklands, Cony- 

 beares, and Pye Smiths of England, or the Chalmerses, Dun- 

 cans, and Flemings of our own country, must have come to 

 the study of this question of the world's age with at least no 

 bias in favour of the geological estimate. The old, and, as 

 it has proven, erroneous reading of the Mosaic account, was 

 by much too general a one early in the present century, not 

 to have exerted upon them, in their character as ministers of 

 religion, a sensible influence of a directly opposite nature. 

 And the fact of the complete reversal of their original bias, 

 and of the broad unhesitating finding on the subject which 

 they ultimately substituted instead, serves to intimate to the 

 uninitiated the strength of the evidence to which they sub- 

 mitted. There can be nothing more certain than that it is 

 minds of the same calibre and class, engaged in the same in- 

 ductive track, that yielded in the first instance to the astro- 

 nomical evidence regarding the earth's motion, and, in the 

 second, to the geological evidence regarding the earth's age.* 



* The chapter in which this passage occurs originally appeared, with 

 several of the others, in the "Witness" newspaper, in a series of articles, 

 entitled " Rambles of a Geologist," and drew forth the following letter 

 from a correspondent of the "Scottish Press," the organ of a powerful and 



