30 CONSISTENCY OF GEOLOGICAL 
pours "upon the face of the deep ;" an incipient 
dispersion of these vapours may have readmitted 
light to the earth, upon the first day, whilst the 
exciting cause of light was still obscured ; and 
the further purification of the atmosphere, upon 
the fourth day, may have caused the sun and 
moon and stars to reappear in the firmament of 
heaven, to assume their new relations to the 
newly modified earth, and to the human race.* 
We have evidence of the presence of light 
during long and distant periods of time, in which 
really discovered fossil bones that must have belonged to species 
and genera of animals, which now no where exist, either on the 
earth or in the ocean, and if the destruction of these genera or 
species cannot be accounted for by the general deluge, or any 
other catastrophe to which we know, from authentic history, that 
our globe has been actually subjected, or if it be a fact, that 
towards the surface of the earth are found strata, which could 
not have been so disposed as they are, but by the sea, or at least 
some watery mass remaining over them in a state of tranquillity, 
for a much longer period than the duration of Noah's flood; if 
these things be indeed well ascertained, of which I am however 
by no means convinced, there is nothing in the sacred writings 
forbidding us to suppose that they are the ruins of a former 
earth, deposited in the chaotic mass of which Moses informed us 
that God formed the present system. His history, as far as 
it comes down, is the history of the present earth, and of the 
primeval ancestors of its present inhabitants ; and one of the 
most scientific and ingenious of geologists has clearly proved, f 
that the human race cannot be much more ancient than it ap- 
pears to be in the writings of the Hebrew lawgiver." — Stack- 
house s Bible J by Bishop Gleig, p. 6, 7, 1816. 
* See note, p. 26. 
t See Cuvier's Essay on the Theory of the Earth. 
