GENERAL INDICATIONS. 78o 



duration of human society upon it dwindles into an unit, and to which the lapse of time 

 since man was made in the image of God bears a less proportion, than the life of one 

 cut off on the day of birth to that of the species. 



The opening verse of the Scriptures announces the fact of a dependant universe being 

 created by the Almighty, but assigns no date to the mighty operation. Geology demands 

 nothing beyond what this indefinite enunciation of the Creator's work as to time supplies ; 

 and theology, in the passage, requires only an acknowledgment of the will, power, and 

 wisdom of the one God, in originating and superintending the terrestrial constitution. 

 At a precise point of time, the earth, in its primordial elements, as we are left quite at 

 liberty to conceive, was called into being, but the question is completely undetermined 

 when that time was. An interval as long as the imagination can entertain may be 

 placed between the first operation of Divine power and the subsequent arrangement of 

 the globe for the habitation of man. The record allows room enough for all those 

 wonderful changes and transformations to transpire, the indubitable memorials of which 

 are discovered in the deep and dark places of the earth, which, after ages of entombment, 

 have been commanded to show themselves ; but yet, as if to prevent man from becoming 

 proud amid the triumphs of his genius, he is checked at once in the endeavour to measure 

 the interval, the vastness of which he can discern, which will ever remain to us in the 

 present state, invested with the obscurity that marks the number of the ocean's sands. 

 There has been, however, no little flippancy and contraction of mind evinced by many who 

 have carped at the demands of geological time, for time is long or short according to the 

 particular standard we employ in its measurement. The man of fourscore years appears 

 venerable when compared with the nestling infant in its mother's arms, but becomes a 

 very greenhorn by the side of Methusaleh ; and thus, the immense periods which terrestrial 

 phenomena intimate, shrink into a span, in contrast with His duration at whose will they 

 originated, and with the immortality for which we ourselves are destined. 



That our globe also was the seat of animal and vegetable life, through a countless series 

 of ages, before its occupation by the human species that successive races flourished, 

 decayed, and altogether vanished, long anterior to the appearance of man upon the stage 

 of life is a conclusion of which irrefragable evidence is afforded in the myriad forms of 

 once animated existence, whose remains have been disinterred from their graves in the 

 lias, gypsum-quarries, and chalk, and which enter almost exclusively into the composition 

 of vast masses of mountain limestone. The earth is in truth a charnel-house, full of 

 bones, sinews, shells, leaves, and prostrate trunks, and with consummate skill the botanist 

 and comparative anatomist have traced the animal and vegetable forms indicated by the 

 fragments gathered from the wreck of life. Ancient conditions of our planet have thus 

 been restored, when stately ferns and graceful palms threw their shadows upon its surface, 

 and herbivorous and carnivorous quadrupeds roamed in its forests ; when animate objects 

 of uncouth shape swarmed in its rivers, and sported on its plains ; all, however, swept 

 away antecedent to the human creation, and whose skeletons, after being washed in the 

 ocean, were laid up in the solid masonry of the globe's present superstructure. The cur- 

 rent of popular opinion has run violently against statements of this kind ; for no sentiment 

 has stronger hold of the common mind, than that all the alarming phenomena of nature, 

 with the existence of deatli in the animal kingdom, are the penal consequences of human 

 transgression. Poetry has helped to extend and perpetuate this idea, which observation 

 contradicts, and which a rational exegesis of the Scripture testimony has shown to be un- 

 supported by the record from which it was primarily derived. 



" Thus began 

 Outrage from lifeless things; but Discord first, 



Daughter of Sin, among the irrational, 



3E 



