68 VULCANISM ITS NATURE AND FUNCTION. 



streams. The great diversity of animal and vegetable life 

 which now adorns this earth is clearly associated with its 

 diversity of surface, and this diversity of surface this 

 arrangement into hill and dale, into table-land and plain, 

 into island and continent, with all its varying accompani- 

 ments of wind and ocean-currents and climate is the direct 

 result of the earth's incessant vulcanicity. Unless then, 

 when considering the earthquake, volcano, and crust-motion, 

 we can learn to regard them as necessary portions of the 

 orderly mechanism of our planet, we are viewing them in 

 the feeblest light, and much as the cowering savage, who 

 sees in them only disorder and destruction, and the wrath 

 of his offended deities. And even where science cannot 

 pierce the veil, we may rest assured, in this as in other 

 arrangements of nature, that nothing is jarring, but that all, 

 however unintelligible to our finite comprehensions, is in 

 perfect harmony, and indispensable to the maintenance of 

 this wondrous world-plan 



" All seeming discord, things not understood ; 

 All partial evil, universal good. " 





