60 ON CHANGES IN THE DISPOSITION 



fulcrum, that he might move the earth : may a Mo- 

 dern now dare to say, place the command of Volca- 

 nic power in my hand, and I will render the Sahara 

 as fertile as the declivities of the Atlas. 



As the high antiquity of the globe has been demon- 

 strated in the last chapter, from geological evidences, so 

 has a long period of time been assigned to the present 

 earth ; to that condition which has succeeded to the last 

 great revolutions. This is argued from the tardiness of 

 the actions of rivers, and from the magnitude of the 

 effects attributed to them. Geologists have endeavoured 

 to compute that antiquity by various means, often by 

 very childish "chronometers," when deposits of peat and 

 accumulations'of stalactites, have been adduced as mea- 

 sures of time. Thus also by measuring the annual depth 

 of earth deposited in the valley of Egypt, it has been at- 

 tempted to fix the period at which the Nile began to 

 flow. But this is equally vain ; since the multitude of 

 modifying causes must render all such deposits useless, 

 even as the means of an approximation, independently 

 of the fact that all are not the product of rivers. Nor 

 need I state the difficulty of making such an approxi- 

 mation from the fresh water formations ; while it must 

 always be recollected that no conclusions of this nature 

 need interfere with the historical period of the Creation 

 of man, since this event is totally independent of the 

 geological history of even the present earth. 



In treating of the preceding subjects, it became impos- 

 sible to avoid those questions on which no one can enter, 

 without a deep sense of their grave and serious nature. 

 So implicated is geology in the history of Creation, that 

 those higher investigations, which can alone confer on 

 it that dignity from which it has unjustly been excluded, 

 must otherwise have been abandoned. Nor could it have 

 been avoided for other reasons : since the ignorant at- 



