CONSISTENCY OF GEOLOGY WITH SACRED HISTORY. 429 



the soda to sodium ; in the lime to calcium, and in the usual con- 

 taminating oxide, to iron. Supposing these to be the ultimate ele- 

 ments of the mineral, the proximate principles would be produced, 

 first by their uniting, chemically, to form these binary compounds ; 

 which would still farther unite, but still chemically, to form the inte- 

 grant particles of the mineral and these particles united mechanically 

 by cohesion, would form the mineral itself. 



The same reasoning may be applied to every variety of rocks and 

 minerals. Limestone, consisting for its immediate principles, of lime 

 carbonic acid and water, contains, for its ultimate elements, accord- 

 ing to the present state of our knowledge, calcium, carbon, hydrogen 

 and oxygen ; the latter principle being united with each of the former 

 ones, so as to produce the lim.e, (oxygen and calcium,) the carbonic 

 acid, (carbon and oxygen,) and the water, (oxygen and hydrogen.) 

 If the hmestone were a magnesian one, then we must add oxygen 

 and magnesium, and so of other earths, as silex or alumine, if they 

 were present. 



How far back, and how near to the isolated, independent state, we 

 are to trace each element, we cannot determine. Whether the ele- 

 ments were created, in the first place, in a state of perfect freedom, 

 and their earliest movement was, not so much, that of elemental war, 

 as of elemental combination ; or whether, they were combined in 

 pairs, and those pairs again combined, to form more complex results 

 we can never know with certainty ; and all our suggestions on this 

 subject being necessarily hypothetical, ought of course to be concisely 

 stated. 



But the discussion of these questions, which might easily be extend- 

 ed to the most complex rocks, and to all their imbedded minerals, 

 however curious and even interesting, is in no way material to our 

 proceeding to reason intelligibly — may we not say even conclusively, 

 upon the act or process, which must, according to physical laws, have 

 preceded the concretion of the materials of the primitive rocks. 



Suppose the elements which are to form granite, to have already 

 united, and a previous state of chemical mobility, to have rendered 

 such a result possible, a simultaneous deposition of the different min- 

 erals must of course happen ; the quartzy particles must fiud their 

 fellows, those of feldspar will do the same, and those of mica the 

 same, and the three minerals, born at the same moment, will find re- 

 pose in the same cradle. In the same manner, their ornamental com- 

 panions, (not essential to the rock, but often studding it, like gems set 

 in royal robes) — the emeralds, the topazes, the garnets, the tourma- 



