228 
GEOLOGICAL REMARKS. 
in regard to the eruptions of a volcano, or the appearance or 
disappearance of an island. Such events are of minor im- 
portance. Those mighty changes to which I would be 
understood to allude, can hardly be laid to the account of 
chemical agency. We can easily comprehend how sub- 
terranean fires will occasionally burst forth, and can thus 
satisfactorily account for earthquake or volcano ; but it is 
not to any clashing of properties, or to any visible causes, 
that the changes of which I speak can be attributed. They 
appear rather as the consequences of direct agency, of an 
invisible power, not as the occasional and fretful workings 
of nature herself. The marks of that awful catastrophe 
which so nearly extinguished the human race, are every 
day becoming more and more visible as geological research 
proceeds. Thus, in the limestone caves at Wellington 
Valley, the remains of fossils and exuviae, shew that their 
depths were penetrated by the same searching element that 
poured into the caverns of Kirkdale and other places. They 
are as gleams of sunshine falling upon the pages of that 
sublime and splendid volume, in which the history of the 
deluge is alone to be found ; as if the Almighty intended 
that His word should stand single and unsupported before 
mankind : and when we consider that such corroborative 
testimonies of his wrath, as those I have noticed, were in 
all probability wholly unknown to those who wrote that 
sacred book, the discovery of the remains of a past world, 
must strike those under whose knowledge it may fall with 
the truth of that awful event, which language has vainly 
endeavoured to describe and painters to represent. 
