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were all entitled to credit, more especially so the noble lord in the chair, for 
coming to the front while so many were hanging back. He must take the 
liberty of congratulating all upon the success which had attended their in- 
augural meeting, and to compliment their distinguished Vice-President upon 
his able paper. As a sailor, he was thankful for the formation of such an insti- 
tution ; not, indeed, that he had met many infidels at sea. They that go down 
to the sea in ships, they see the wonders of the Lord in the great deep. 
They have too many hair-breadth escapes not to know that every hair of their 
head is numbered. Though he had met many infidels on land, he was 
thankful to say, he had met very few in his travels by sea : a sailor’s life did 
not seem to suit such people— they collapsed in the face of danger, showing 
themselves to be mere drums. Sailors were a religious people m their way ; 
their superstition, the result of their ignorance, is an acknowledgment of 
their belief in a God,— indeed, he believed every man’s conscience testified to 
the existence of the Deity; and he could only conceive of those who attacked 
the truths of revelation, as men who wanted to get rid of the findings ot t e 
conscience, by endeavouring to persuade themselves that neither it nor Scrip- 
ture was correct. It was most natural that such men should ask Christians 
to give up their Christianity before they entered upon the discussion of 
science, otherwise they could not reasonably deny miracles ; since every 
Christian was a miracle, and Christianity itself was a standing miracle. It was 
simply absurd to assert that the teachings of revelation were inconsistent 
with those of science. For besides the names of Christian men mentioned 
by our learned Vice-President, who had taken the first rank in the walks of 
science, I may add Captain Maury ; and, as science knows no country, we 
may claim him as a compatriot, and he, with the modesty of genius, at once 
acknowledges that the idea of his complete theory of the wind’s “ circuits 
was derived from Holy Writ. Apart from some such intimation, it is not 
easy to conceive the possibility of his obtaining the necessary amount ot 
facts out of which to have originated the idea, seeing that the facts must 
more or less have covered the earth from pole to pole and girded the globe. 
As for the endless ages contended for by geologists, and based upon the slow 
formation of deltas in rivers, they are the merest theories. If such men had 
seen the rapid changes that take place in a short time that he had seen, they 
would not be disposed to place much confidence in such myths. He had seen 
trees beino- carried down the rivers, caught, and forming an impediment 
to the rapidity of the stream, upon which a deposit immediately took 
place, and islands were formed in a few hours. A change in the direction of the 
current, or sometimes an increase of its volume, has eaten away these islands, 
and the deposit takes place at the next obstruction, by which an island is 
formed with the stratification of the former island inverted. Place one ot 
these geologists to examine one of them, without informing him of their 
recent origin, and he would, consistently with the basis of these endless ages, 
pronounce that they had existed for hundreds or thousands of years, as may 
be. He recollected on one occasion getting aground up a river m a ship he 
commanded, when the ship was imbedded in a mud dock in a few hours, out 
