MACK.IE— ROCKS AND XHEIR TEACHINGS. 
101 
tains," " which can never be moved," were the figures of speech they 
expressively employed. We regard the sea as the emblem of eternity, 
and as 
" Unchangeable, save to its wild waves' play 
Time writes no changes on its azure brow; 
Such as creation's dawn beheld, ic rolleth 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 
the 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 Neptunists — 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 
