156 
THE GEOLOGIST, 
would have beeu the case had it constituted the first disrupted pellicle of a 
Tuollen globe. In the next place, we do not know that granite always is the 
foundation-rock of every area. We do not know, moreover, in many, nay 
most, eases, tliat it is die lowest rock, for human labour has never penetrated 
througli it, scarcely, indeed, even into it. Tliirdly, there is no evidence to 
prove it is an igneous, e., a tire-formed, or molten product. On the contrary, 
the existence in it of numerous cavities half empty, half (illed with water shows 
that at most hot water or steam has been the active agent of the heat present 
in its formation. Indeed, to us it appears tliat granite presents none of the 
conditions which it should do of a fire-formed, or once fused rock. Its crys- 
talline condition, considering the substances of which it is composed, seems 
decidedly against that theory, for taking one of its constituents, quartz, for ex- 
ample, will anyone point out a single instance of heat -melted silex that is not 
vitreous, or glassy after fusion ; or a single instance, on the otlier hand, of a crys- 
talline condition resulting from the action upon that substance of dry heat. 
Take the felspar, and if you are anything at all of a chemist, will you tell us II 
the soda, or the potash which it contains is now in tlie state ui which it should 
be if your granite had ever been fused. All that it is allowable to state of 
granite is that it is a condition of rock which has been produced at every geo- 
logical period in tlie deep-seated regions of the earth immechately below its 
stratified crust. The truth is, we do not know what is the fundamental rock 
of the stratified crust of the globe, unless the old gneiss be regarded as such, 
and witli it some of the oldest gi-anites, not all granites indiscriminately. 
We should also be inclined to take objection to some of our author's opinions 
in respect to the physical conditions of the planets, although in others we 
should be disposed to concur. For example, we should regard the moon as 
presenting to us a worn-out consolidated globe, not a world in a first or even 
early stage of condition. If our own globe is presumed to have consolidated 
from a vaporous state, it must first have passed through a liquid condition ; 
and then the consolidation carried still fiu-ther, earths and the solid materials 
would be produced. In the process of time the balance of fluid and gas re- 
maining as sea and atmosphere would be condensed also, and a solid worn-out 
globe like the moon would appear to be the inevitable result. 
The new doctrine attempted to be inculcated by our author's book may be 
briefly given and best by a few short extracts from the early part (p. 2'1' et seq.). 
After describing a period of desolation to which he believes the world, after 
the destruction of the first human or pre-adamie race, was reduced, and for the 
warrautry for which state of tilings he pleads the biblical passage, "and no 
plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet grown, 
for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not 
a man to till the ground." Our author continues, 
" The new order of things is thus ushered in by a statement of the effects of 
some great overtum or ruin which had extinguished the existence of the vege- 
table and animal world, and had snatched from the earth the race of the sixth 
day men." * * * If or " though on the sixth day God created man, m;Je 
and female, and blessed them, saying, ' Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish 
the earth, and subdue it,' however fuUy that blessing may once have been re- 
alized, now at least no remains of that race were anywhere to be found, ' for 
there was not a man to till the ground.' And if all vegetation was thus 
obliterated, and man extinguished, we conclude that the tribes of the lower 
animals must also have perished ; and that the earth, of whose creation and 
furnishing we have read in the first chapter of Genesis, was at the period re- 
ferred to in the opening of this succeeding passage a desolate waste, wherein 
neither plant nor animal gave token of the creative wisdom and power of God. 
The dumb rocks alone retamed the traces of a brighter era, but the remains 
