54 ON CHANGES IN THE DISPOSITION 



perceive that scheme of beneficence, by which it ap- 

 pears to be ordered that this event shall ,not happen. 



I have already shown that successive revolutions 

 had occurred, long before the mountains had been 

 levelled: while still the earth retained those inequalities 

 without which the rains could not have been conducted 

 to the sea, without which they would not even have 

 descended as they now do, on the earth. In no in- 

 stance, have we reason to think that the natural decay 

 of the existing system had taken place, that the earth 

 was rendered unfit for the habitation of animals before 

 its subversion, or that its races had been gradually 

 suffered to expire as the world was decaying around 

 them. Our own earth will never therefore arrive at 

 the possible state contemplated in the preceding para- 

 graph. Long ere that, we have reason to expect that 

 violent death of the present system which every con- 

 sideration shows us to be the most beneficent, and by 

 means which our knowledge of the past enables us to 

 assign. And as analogy teaches us that this event will 

 take place while the machinery of the earth is yet un- 

 impaired, so it informs us that the catastrophe will be 

 violent and complete. Let that day come when it 

 may, we have reason to think that it will terminate 

 the existence of all the races of terrestrial beings. 

 This we may believe from physical analogies alone: 

 by inferring the progression from the precedence of a 

 series of similar and concatenated events. Thus Geo- 

 logy confirms the important truth, that the destruc- 

 tion of the world, in which we are taught to believe, 

 is physically probable ; as it also teaches us that it is one 

 out of a great series of similar events by which this 

 globe has hitherto been regulated. The former revo- 

 lutions are the types of that which we are ordered to 

 expect; nor is it difficult to imagine what the nature 



