io6 Geology as a rneQins of culture — A. Winchell. 
realms of philosophy and theology, whose light tinges the clouds 
which engirt a prime\al world. I suffer myself to follow 
thought into these remoter realms for the purpose of showing 
the vastness of the range of geological contemplation, though 
the ordinary geologist may seldom explore it. Geological facts 
and doctrines, with which we are all chiefly occupied, lie in a 
single province of the science. 
I said that the grooves of passing events run into the distinct 
future as into the distinct past over which the reader has been 
transported by a rapid flight. By direct deductive reasoning 
from the generalized principle of a cooling globe, we are able 
to depict future vicissitudes with no less certainty than those 
past. We anticipate a frozen world and a darkened sun. 
From the generalized doctrine of slow continental degradation 
we depict beforehand the destructive work of future ages. 
From the action of the moon on the lagging lunar tide, we are 
enabled to foresee a lengthened day, and finally synchronistic 
rotary and orbital movements of the earth, accomplished 
by a slower action of the sun on the solar tide. Through the 
operation of a resisting medium — whether ethereal, meteoric or 
molecular — we look forward to a general gathering of all the 
dead planets at a common sepulchre. Then by completing the 
parallelism already delineated in reference to the past, we learn 
that the unrolled history of this world represents that of all the 
worlds of our system ; and the unrolled history of the system 
pictures that of the firmament. And now the grand and cul- 
minating inference of all science looms before our intelligence 
in majesty awful and inspiring: The history of matter is one in 
all the bounds of all space and in all the a^ons of time past and 
time to come. The vicissitudes of yesterday are a paragraph in 
the atmals of universal matter. In that totality every human 
life is a constituent jxart. Man stands in the midst, and casting 
his mental glances backward and forward, affirms and feels 
his unity with all. AJan only as an organistn. Those glances 
are not the rays of sun or star — they are the thoughts which 
imperishable and unchanging mind has written on the forms of 
star and planet and organism. And thus, out from the forms of 
matter as they perish and disappear, rises an entity which neither 
changes nor disappears, nor yet endures as mindless matter — 
