371 
on religion. We hope it is understood that our fear has never 
arisen from its truthfulness. But false speculations are to be 
feared. 
It may be the highest presumption in us to allow the thought 
to enter our minds, yet we cannot help thinking that the be- 
wilderment of our geological guides may be in a great measure 
traced to one fallacy. They seem to think that it is impossible 
that a stratum of rock could have been formed anywhere else 
on the earth's surface than where it now lies. Although we 
have seen that a whole formation, half as large as an English 
county, has been turned literally upside down, it seems, ac- 
cording to current ideas, that this remarkable revolution must 
have taken place on the spot above which the strata of this 
formation were originally deposited. Upheaval and subsidence 
being the only recognized movements of the earth's surface, 
the transportation of such masses from one latitude or longi- 
tude to another, is not to be thought of ! It is, however, 
extremely difficult for one who looks at the subject from a 
common-sense point of view, to imagine the mass of rock 
forming half an English county turned over, so that it would 
lie upside down over the same portion of terrestrial surface on 
which it lay before ; but if such a mass might change its place, 
so that its latitude or longitude, or both, should no longer be 
the same as they were, it is hard to see how the British Isles 
themselves might not also change their place. But such change 
of place at once introduces the idea of a change of climate, 
and that again a change of the plants and animals inhabiting 
the transported region. Alterations of climate have been 
generally accounted for by referring to changes in the at- 
mosphere arising from new directions of the oceanic currents, 
or changes of sea into land, or of land into sea. But such changes 
could never account adequately for the plants and animals of a 
tropical climate that are found embedded in the rocks even of 
England itself. Winds passing over burning deserts, and the 
Gulf Stream passing more directly northward, might modify 
the climate greatly ; but with the relation of the sun and sur- 
face, as it stands, they could never account for the fossils that 
are found in the North now. The case is very different with 
the view to which I am now calling attention/ For example, 
when we have satisfactory evidence that a climate like that of 
Egypt once affected the life of England, and that a change from 
Egyptian heat to our present climate lias extinguished certain 
species that now live only in the Nile, or in rivers of distant 
lands, we are free to ask whether this change is the result of an 
alteration in the atmosphere of England, considered in its rela- 
