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stant unknown formations under one name ; in giving them a simul- 

 taneous origin, and in determining their date, not by the organic re- 

 mains we had discovered, but by those we expected hypothetically 

 hereafter to discover, in them ; we have given one more example 

 of the passion with which the mind fastens upon general conclusions, 

 and of the readiness with which it leaves the consideration of 

 unconnected truths. 



Are then the facts of our science opposed to the sacred records ? 

 and do we deny the reality of a historic deluge ? I utterly reject such 

 an inference. Moral and physical truth may partake of a common 

 essence, but as far as we are concerned, their foundations are inde- 

 pendent, and have not one common element. And in the narrations 

 of a great fatal catastrophe, handed down to us, not in our sacred 

 books only, but in the traditions of all nations, there is not a word to 

 justify us in looking to any mere physical monuments as the intelligi- 

 ble records of that event : such monuments, at least, have not yet 

 been found, and it is not perhaps intended that they ever should be 

 found. If, however, we should hereafter discover the skeletons of an- 

 cient tribes, and the works of ancient art buried in the superficial de- 

 tritus of any large region of the earth ; then, and not till then, we may 

 speculate about their stature and their manners and their numbers, 

 as we now speculate among the disinterred ruins of an ancient city. 



We might, I think, rest content with such a general answer as 

 this. But we may advance one step further — History is a con- 

 tinued record of passions and events unconnected with the enduring 

 laws of mere material agents — The progress of physical induction, 

 on the contrary, leads us on to discoveries, of which the mere light 

 of history would not indicate a single trace. But the facts re- 

 corded in history may sometimes, without confounding the nature 

 of moral and physical truth, be brought into a general accordance 

 with the known phsenomena of nature : and such general accordance 

 I affirm there is between our historical traditions and the phenomena of 

 geology. Both tell us in a language easily understood, though written 

 in far different characters, that man is a recent sojourner on the sur- 

 face of the earth. Again, though we have not yet found the certain 

 traces of any great diluvian catastrophe which we can affirm to be 

 within the human period ; we have, at least, shown, that paroxysms of 

 internal energy, accompanied by the elevation of mountain chains, and 

 followed by mighty waves desolating whole regions of the earth, were 

 a part of the mechanism of nature. And what has happened, again 

 and again, from the most ancient, up to the most modern periods in 

 the natural history of the earth, may have happened once during the 

 few thousand years that man has been living on its surface. We have 

 therefore, taken away all anterior incredibility from the fact of a 

 recent deluge ; and we have prepared the mind, doubting about the 

 truth of things of which it knows not either the origin or the end, for 

 the adoption of this fact on the weight of historic testimony. 



If, Gentlemen, I believed that the imagination, the feelings, the 

 active intellectual powers bearing on the business of life, and the 

 highest capacities of our nature, were blunted or impaired by the 



