MACKIE — ROCKS AND THEIR TEACHINGS. 



101 



tains," wMch can never be moved," were the figures of speech they 

 expressively employed. We regard the sea as the emblem of eternity, 

 and as 



" tJnchangeable, save to its wild waves' play 

 Time writes no changes on its azure brow; 

 Such as creation's dawn beheld, it roUeth now." 



"We know the land in our own age is slowly rising from the sea in 

 some parts of our world, and slowly going down in others. We know 

 that ten thousand feet high upon our mountains the solid rocks contain 

 title debris left by the waves ; and that higher still on their lofty sides are 

 mounds of shelly gravels, and we see in the faults and fissures of their 

 gorges the powers of the ancient earthquakes. 



In our own days we have seen the cities rock and reel like drunken 

 men, and thousands of human beings engulphed in the yawning chasms ; 

 in historic times, we know, others have been buried beneath the showers 

 of scoriae and ashes, and the lava-streams of flaming volcanos. Amidst 

 the sediments of the past we find the grey consolidated grits of 

 primeval eruptions, and great dykes and walls of lava, trap, and basalt 

 piercing and penetrating the solid beds of stone. We find the con- 

 solidated lakes of once-molten matter intercalated between sedimentary 

 formations of various ages ; and so we know that the volcanic forces 

 were as intermittent in their action during the pre-adamic periods as 

 in our own. 



The ancients, with fewer facts before them, said the sea was unstable ; 

 we say, the land. May not a dispassionate investigation of all the evidence 

 prove advantageous to the truth? Great continents are thought to 

 have gone down, others to have risen up. The great submarine 

 plateau, over which the electric messages soon will pass, looks very 

 like one of the former ; would the ocean level remain unchanged 

 by submergences as this ? We had, in one not very distant period, 

 two classes of Geologists — the Plutonists and the I^eptunists — living in 

 two opposite districts, the one gazing on the fire-formed, the other on 

 the water-formed rocks ; but neither looking beyond their own limited 

 arena. And, as Hutton combined the correct elements of both their 

 doctrines, might not a modification of the views of both oceanists and 

 terrestrialists be attended with beneficial results ? Still, for present 

 purposes, we may accept the recognised doctrine, and regard the ground 



