380 On the Mosaic account of the Creation. 



How then he can refer the deposition of vegetable or organis- 

 ed matter to that revolution is indeed truly astonishing, and 

 the more so, since in his detail of the events which occupied 

 the third creative day, he clearly shews us that the vege- 

 tation was called into existence after the convulsion which 

 disclosed the earth to view was accomplished and past. ' i The 

 mineral materials which retained their primitive order and 

 position in the undisturbed dry land, were here fractured, 

 severed, and dispersed, or in various ways disturbed ; and the 

 soils which had at first rested on their rocky bases, were ne- 

 cessarily displaced by the rupture of those bases, and being 

 precipitated into the new profundity together with the in- 

 numerable fragments of the broken webs, formed the shiny 

 or the shingly bottom of the new sea. On that bottom, and 

 in all the varieties of its parts, whether in its lowest depths, 

 or upon the submerged masses which lay upon it, marine 

 matter of every kind, vegetable and animal, was produced 

 in abundance, with the power of perpetual reproduction ; and 

 it continued to increase in quantity, in a multiple ratio, 

 during many ages."* 



Thus he has throughout his argument most completely 

 contradicted and destroyed the theory he was labouring to 

 establish, and he compels himself therefore, either to relin- 

 quish the period which he has assigned to his first revolu- 

 tion, or that of his coal deposits ; for if he maintains the 

 former, it is evident that it could not have contributed to the 

 latter ; or if he maintains the latter, then must it have been 

 effected by another convulsion than that of the separation of 

 land and sea, and consequently it involves a multiplicity 

 of revolutions, which he has already argued to prove incon- 

 sistent with the doctrines of the Mosaic record. 



It is moreover evident, that the marine vegetation from 

 which he would derive his coal, must, according to his views 

 have been in existence previous to " the first disruption and 



* Ibid, p. 217. 



