i8 
toner's address. 
which demand a much higher antiquity for the world 
than biblical scholars have been assigning to it. In 
the absence of specific revelation on the subject of the 
age of the earth, and the time of the first appearance 
of man on it, such questions are properly within the 
domain of scientific inquiry, and therefore all discov- 
ered facts in any wise bearing upon them should be 
presented to the public and discussed in a philosophic 
spirit, free from bias or preconceived notions. 
The geologist in studying the rocks that compose 
the earth's crust recognizes their component parts and 
the organic forms embedded in them, and by such facts 
determines their relative position and their ages. The 
remains of man and his works found in the rocks, or 
buried in the earth, must be judged by the same rules 
as those which apply to the remains of plants or ani- 
mals. Fossils and implements are the medals of great 
epochs in the earth's history. When once the consent 
of theologians to go beyond the traditional chronology 
of creation becomes general, cosmographers will have 
less difficulty in tracing the evolution of the globe that 
we inhabit and calculating the period required to pre- 
pare it for supporting animal life.* 
^ It may not be amiss to present a few of the reasons which estab- 
lish in the minds of competent physicists a belief in the great antiquity 
of the earth. Sir William Thompson, in the Philosophical Magazine 
for 1863, has calculated the probable age of the crust of the earth at 
98,000,000 years, which only comprehends the geological history 
of the globe. The astronomer Laplace, in his Nebular Theory of the 
Cosmogony of the Universe, as presented in an admirable paper by 
Prof. S. Newcomb before the Philosophical Society of Washington, ^ 
starts with the hypothesis that there was probably a time when the 
sun with its atmosphere occupied all the space of the solar system. 
That in its revolutions, and by the radiation of its heat into space, it 
