CREATION OF ANIMALS. 41 



It appears, I hope, from what has been ob- 

 served, in the present chapter, on the subject of 

 animals brought into being subsequent to the 

 fall, and upon those that have since that sad 

 event become extinct from whatever cause, that 

 Divine Providence, after the first creation of man 

 and the animal kingdom, did not leave all things 

 to the action of the original laws which had 

 received his awful sanction before the fall, but 

 altered those by which this system, especially 

 our own globe, was guided and governed before 

 that fatal event, to suit them to what had taken 

 place, and to the altered and deteriorated moral 

 state of man. We learn from the Apostle Saint 

 Peter, that the primeval globe and its heavens 

 or atmosphere, perished at the deluge, 1 by which 

 expression less cannot be intended, than that the 

 atmosphere and the earth were then, as it were, 

 new mixed, so as to render the former less 

 friendly to life and health, whence would gradu- 

 ally follow the shortening of human, and pro- 

 bably animal life ; and subject to raging storms 

 and hurricanes ; to the fury and fearful effects of 

 thunder and lightning ; to the overflowing vio- 

 lence of torrents of rain : while the latter, from 

 the breaking up, inversion, mixing, depression, 

 or elevation of its original strata, and the addition 

 of new ones from animal and vegetable deposites, 2 

 was rendered in many places utterly barren, and 



1 Gr. ciTrwXtro. 2 Pet. iii. 6. 2 See Appendix, note 11. 



