NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 45 



with air and water playing round it. There were vast 

 irregidarities in tlie surface — irregularities trifling, per- 

 haps, compared with the wdiole bulk of the globe, but 

 assuredly vast in comj^arison with any which now exist 

 upon it. These irregularities might be occasioned by 

 inequalities in the cooling of the substance, or by acci- 

 dental and local sluggishness of the materials, or by local 

 effects of the concentrated internal heat. From what- 

 ever cause they arose, there they were — enormous 

 granitic mountains, interspersed w^ith seas which sunk 

 to a depth equally profound, and by which, perhaps, the 

 mountains w^ere wholly or partially covered. Now, it is 

 a fact, of which the very first principles of geology assure 

 us, that the solids of the globe cannot for a moment be 

 exposed to water, or to the atmosphere, without becom- 

 ing liable to change. They instantly begin to wear 

 down. This operation, we may be assured, proceeded 

 with as much certainty in the earliest ages of our earth's 

 history, as it does now, but upon a much more magnifi- 

 cent scale. There is tolerably good evidence that the 

 seas of those days were not in some instances less than a 

 hundred miles in depth, however much more. The sub- 

 aqueous mountains must have been of at least equal 

 magnitude. The system of disintegration consequent upon 

 such conditions would be enormous. The matters worn 

 off, being carried into the neighbouring depths, and there 

 deposited, became the components of the earliest stratified 

 rocks, the first seiies of which is the Gneiss and Mica 

 Slate System, or series, examples of which are exposed 

 to view in the Highlands of Scotland and in the West 

 of England. The vast thickness of these beds, in some 

 instances, is what suggests the profoundness of the 

 primeval oceans in which they were formed ; the Penn- 

 sylvanian grauwacke, a member of the next highest 



