122 SPECIES. 



out the word ' flood' from the vocabulary of positive geology." 

 This day approaches still nearer.* 



Before mooting, in our turn, a theory about the vertebrate 

 animal kingdom (the only one which ought to occupy our atten- 

 tion) on the surface of the globe, we simply ask, what is meant 

 by Etienne Greoffroy by the words some considerable time ? 

 This is a difficulty, we own, and we have just said so. We 

 wish that the thirty thousand years,f the maximum time which 

 we give to the farthest origin of man, should be considered as 

 being the age which separates us from the first organic matter 

 cast into the bosom of the waters, in the same proportion as 

 the radius of the earth is to the distance which separates our 

 sun from the most distant star of the most distant nebulous 



* We shall be thanked for publishing here the following extract from a 

 letter addressed to us by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the 3rd of June, 

 1860, and which relates to all these questions. " I said, two or three years 

 ago, as I have learnt from M. Lartet (who remembered the expression which 

 I had myself forgotten), that the present movement of science tends to sub- 

 stitute in geology the idea of the evolution of the globe for that of revolutions. 

 M. Lartet has taken up this view, and adheres to it. It is of great import- 

 ance to me, as regards my works on species, in which we must in this case sub- 

 stitute the notion of evolution for that of revolution ; revolutions are here pre- 

 tended creations, abruptly successive. It is time to have done with these 

 views, which, instead of taking creation as having been once concluded, make 

 at every instant the Deus ex machinti intervene." 



f [" In the neighbourhood of Mount JEtna, or on the sides of that exten- 

 sive mountain, there are beds of lava covered over with a considerable thick- 

 ness of earth ; and at least another, again, which though known from ancient 

 monuments and historical records to have issued from the volcano at least 

 two thousand years ago, is still almost entirely destitute of soil and vegeta- 

 tion ; in one place a pit has been cut through seven different strata of lava ; 

 and these have been found separated from each other by almost as many 

 thick beds of rich earth. Now, from the fact that a stratum of lava, two 

 thousand years old, is yet scantily covered with earth, it has been inferred 

 by the ingenious Canon Recupero, who has laboured thirty years on the na- 

 tural history of Mount -ZEtna, that the lowest of these strata which have 

 been found divided by so many beds of earth, must have been emitted from 

 the volcanic crater at least fourteen thousand years ago, and consequently, 

 that the age of the earth, whatever it may exceed this term of years, cannot 

 possibly be less." Brydone's Tour through Sicily and Malta (1770). Plato, in 

 his Critias, mentions the island Atalantis as having been buried in the ocean 

 nine thousand years before his own time. In the Universal History, vol. i, 

 (preface,) we are told that the astronomical records of the ancient Chaldeans 

 carry back the origin of society to the remote period of four hundred and 

 seventy-three thousand years. Among comparatively well-known authorities, 

 there is a good deal of difference in the time of the supposed formation of 

 the world. The Hebrew bible makes the creation 3,944 years before the 

 Christian era. The Samaritan bible, 4,305 years; the Septuagint, 5,270 

 years ; Usher, 4,004 years ; Josephus, 4,658 years ; M. Pezron, 5,872 years. 

 In all these differences, however, there is nothing so striking as in the theo- 

 ries we mention above, of Eecupero, the Chaldeans, etc. EDITOK.] 



