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hypothesis is intended to point out a regular series of operations, 

 to mark their dependence, and, lastly, to infer the purposes, and 

 motives, which influenced the Creator, in making this particular 

 arrangement. Without such circumspection, there would be danger 

 lest, measuring the wisdom of God, by the scale of human 

 intellect, inferences derogatory to the divine dignity might be made ; 

 and plans and contrivances be imputed to the Divinity, not only 

 unworthy of omniscience, but originating only in misconception 

 and presumption. 



But, it is hoped, that hypothesis which supposes the transmuta- 

 tion of vegetable matter into bitumen and coal, possesses the in- 

 ternal evidence of truth, since it presents to us a scheme, agreeable 

 to the phenomena we observe, and in which the economy of nature 

 is exercised, in a manner the most agreeable to the ideas we en* 

 tertain of a beneficent Providence. 



Delightful indeed must have been the scene, which the earth 

 must have every where presented, immediately before the deluge. 

 Every hill and valley must have been clothed with luxuriant vege- 

 tation. But the moment of apparent destruction arrives : the lofty 

 forests, with which nearly the whole of the earth is supposed to 

 have been covered, are at once levelled : a world, which just before 

 was Elysium, is desolated, and rendered one vast mass of seeming 

 ruin. Torn up and carried away, by the force of the tremendous 

 torrent, the trees of the mountains are laid on those of the valleys, 

 and are together buried by the subsequent subversion of the moun- 

 tains themselves. Reflecting on such a scene of desolation, unpro- 

 ductive of any evident good, the mind hesitates, and feels a painful 

 dissatisfaction at being unable to imagine the origin of such a mass 

 of evil, without depreciating the wisdom, or the power of the Creator. 

 It is not, indeed, for me, deeply to agitate the abstruse and im- 

 portant question which is here involved ; but permit me to observe, 

 that when the power, the wisdom, or the benevolence of God, appears 



