THE LAPSE OF TIME. 



once; doubtless it will be under the sea again in the 

 future. Look into that future ; look into that past. Can 

 you measure either of those intervals in the years of 

 common chronology ? Yet all over the world the suc- 

 cession of geological strata proclaims the recurrence over 

 and over again of such intervals; silent, indeed, as to 

 positive evidence, but widening the possible limits of 

 time's duration to the furthest stretch of fancy. 



All our great continents have been ever so many 

 times, either in the mass or piecemeal, under the waves 

 of the ocean. Nothing hinders that the bed of every 

 great ocean should have been ever so many times turned 

 into dry land. This interchange is going on now in 

 numberless regions of sea and land. All the facts as we 

 find them are such as they might be expected to be .had 

 this interchange been going on, as no doubt it has been, 

 through an indefinite past. We are bound to allow 

 millions of years for the formation of the strata that 

 have been already examined. There may be depths 

 below the lowest depths yet explored by geologists ; 

 there have certainly been immense intervals which have 

 left no materials for the geologist to explore ; and when 

 all the profoundest deep of stratification shall have been 

 explored, we may still find that the record of all these 

 unnumbered millions of years is but, as it were, the 

 latest page of the volume a page that may have been 

 preceded by a thousand others now almost irrevocably 

 lost or become utterly illegible. There is nothing to 

 hinder the supposition that those earlier pages, if they 

 existed, were, amidst innumerable differences, still in 



