CONSISTENCY OF GEOLOGY WITH SACRED HISTORY. 407 



traneous contents of innumerable organized beings, and the elevation 

 of the whole, sometimes hundreds or thousands of feet above the 

 ocean level ; all these facts leave not a doubt that the fragmentary 

 rocks, required much time for their formation, consolidation and ele- 

 vation, and could never have been the work of a short period, or of 

 a transient deluge. 



Diluvial Deposits. 



As regards the wreck and ruin, with which the surface of our planet 

 is every where covered ; their extraordinary position, and, to some 

 extent, their production, are justly and generally attributed to diluvial 

 agency ; to mighty floods and rushing torrents of water. 



The effects of a deluge are not forming, but destroying ; they are 

 chiefly mechanical, and very little if at all chemical. There is not the 

 least reason to believe, that any solid rock was produced by the gene- 

 ral deluge, nor that any firmly imbedded and petrified organized re- 

 mains belong to such a catastrophe ; to the action of waters, agitated 

 by a mighty moving force ; turbid in the extreme, and filled with mo- 

 ving rocks, stones, gravel, and coarse and fine sediment — and with 

 extirpated and floating vegetables, and drowned animals. 



Diluvium is found every where. The almost universal deposits of 

 rolled pebbles, and bowlders of rock, not only on the margin of the 

 oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers ; but their existence, often in enormous 

 quantities, in situations quite removed from large waters ; inland, — 

 imbedded in high banks, or scattered, occasionally, in profusion, on 

 the face of almost every region, and sometimes on the tops and de- 

 clivities of mountains, as well as in the valleys between them ; their 

 entire difierence, in many cases, from the rocks in the country where 

 they lie — rounded masses, and pebbles of primitive rocks, being de- 

 posited in secondary and tertiary regions, and vice versa ; these, and 

 a multitude of similar facts, are among the most interesting of geolog- 

 ical occurrences. Curvilinear stones may, possibly, in given instan- 

 ces, be formed, by decomposition of the angular portions — by various 

 chemical agencies, aiding those of a mechanical nature ; but pebbles, 

 present unquestionable evidence of having been brought to their 

 rounded form by friction, and they can scarcely be confounded with 

 those produced in any other way. 



The attrition of the common waters of the earth, and even that ex- 

 erted during the short period, of the prevalence of the deluge descri- 

 bed in Genesis, would do very little towards producing so mighty a 

 result ; and we must assign this operation tu an earlier and much 



