Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh. 3371 



James Watt was playing, as Arago tells the story, with the steam of the family tea- 

 kettle — now marking how its expansive force raised the lid of the utensil, and now, 

 how, condensed into water, it trickled powerlessly down the sides of the cold china 

 cup which he had inverted over it — who could have imagined, that in these simple 

 processes there lay wrapped up the principle of by far the mightiest agent of civiliza- 

 tion which man has yet seen — an agent that, in a century after the experiment of the 

 boy, would have succeeded in giving a new character to the arts, both of peace and of 

 war? Or who could have surmised, when, at nearly the same period, the Philadel- 

 phian printer was raising for the first time his silken kite in the fields, that there was 

 an age coming in which, through a knowledge of laws hitherto unknown — but whose 

 existence he was then determining — man would be enabled to bind on his thoughts to 

 the winged lightning, and to send them, with an instantaneousness that would anni- 

 hilate time and space, across land and sea? Nor in that geological branch of natural 

 science to which, with the cognate branches, our Society has specially devoted itself, 

 has performance in proportion to previous promise been less great. When it was first 

 ascertained by the father of English Geology, William Smith — a man not yet more 

 than twelve years dead— that the oolitic beds of England have always a uniform order 

 of succession, and that this uniformity is attended by a certain equally uniform suc- 

 cession of groups of fossils, could it be once inferred that he was laying hold of a prin- 

 ciple which, in the course of a single age, was destined marvellously to unlock the past 

 history of our planet, and to acquaint us with God's doings upon it, as the Creator of 

 all, for myriads of ages ere he had first breathed the spirit of life into human nostrils, 

 or man had become a living soul ? It is one of the great marvels of our day, that 

 through the key furnished by geologic science, we can now peruse the history of past 

 creations more clearly, and arrive at a more thorough and certain knowledge of at 

 least the structural peculiarities of their organisms, than we can read the early histo- 

 ries of the old dynasties of our own species, that flourished and decayed on the banks 

 of the Euphrates or of the Nile, or ascertain the true character of the half- forgotten 

 tyrants with whom they terminated or from whom they began. The gulf between 

 mental and geologic science is still too broad, and perhaps too carelessly surveyed on 

 the theologic side, to permit us to judge of the influence which the discoveries of the 

 geologist are yet to exercise on the ethical departments of literature. We can, how- 

 ever, already see, that the vastly extended knowledge of God's workings of old, which 

 the science communicates, must exercise no slight influence upon certain departments 

 of natural theology, and give a new tone to those controversies regarding the evidences 

 of our faith which the Church has ever and anon to maintain with the world. Geology 

 has already put an end to that old fiction of an infinite series of beings which the 

 atheist was wont to substitute, in his reasonings, for the great First Cause through 

 which all exists ; nor does it leave other than very unsolid ground to the men who 

 would fain find an equivalent for the exploded infinite series of their predecessors, in 

 a developing principle. Nay, I would ask such of the gentlemen whom I now ad- 

 dress as have studied the subject most thoroughly, whether, at those grand lines of 

 division between the palaeozoic and secondary, and again between the secondary and 

 tertiary periods, at which the entire type of organic being alters, so that all on the one 

 side of the gap belongs to one fashion, and all on the other to another and wholly dif- 

 ferent fashion — whether they have not been as thoroughly impressed with the convic- 

 tion that there existed a Creative Agent, to whom the sudden change was owing, as if 

 they themselves had witnessed the miracle of creation ? Farther, may we not hold, 



