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THE BOOK OF THE GREAT SEA-DRAGONS. 
which they afford. The framework of the most sublime 
Science Extant is borne upon their brawny Shoulders— 
the Astronomic Quarters, immutable as Themselves; and 
the incomprehensible, but certain, inevitable, manifest 
Trinity is embodied at their Apex, and Throned the 
Supreme Lord of All. These are Axioms in Nature 
and Morals which, once learned, it seems impossible to 
forget; but the Noahites, though taught by the terrible 
Flood, yielded to the same Antagonist Demons, which 
drowned their fathers in its ruthless waters. However, 
it remained for Moses, Sanchoniatho, Berosus, Manetho, 
and a few other authors—of whose Consenting Scripta 
we know only the unsubstantial but witnessing Echo, to 
vindicate Truth from the Ignorance and Falsehood which 
oppressed her. Erudite in all Heathenism, the former 
was enabled by the Divine Providence to separate from 
the Chaff the Living Bread by which he sustained the 
beleaguered Israelites until the Second Adam, re-con¬ 
quering the long lost Eden, gave of the Tree of Life 
unto all that will : And the latter were ordained for 
Heaven in the midst of those Idolatrous Peoples which 
scorned and madly set it at nought. And now, in these 
latter Days, Satan, knowing that his Time is at hand, 
circumventeth with Weapons drawn from his old Ar¬ 
moury, but tipped with a more deadly poison, and con¬ 
cealed within the folds of a more flowing Robe. Shinaar! 
with the - Cherubic Sword, array Thee in the High 
Testimonies, and smite, smite Dagon upon the Threshold 
of God. 
In like manner, negligent of the Voice of all History, 
Sacred and Profane; not deigning a glance upon the 
Archaic Record, the Footsteps of the Most High — 
implanted on the broad World, are meted with the 
tiny Pole of Time, and pronounced infinite, reachless, 
measureless : And the huge Cycles alleged by the 
Hindoostanee, and Chinese, and negatively implied in 
The Genesis, shrivel into an indefinite Nothing before 
the weird talisman by which they are presently deter¬ 
mined. Time himself is swallowed up by the Enchanter’s 
Wand, and Matter, metamorphosed into the eternal, 
behold ! the resurrection of the atheistical Lucretius. 
Thus soaring Icarus falls into the deep sea, where all 
is sombre blank, and wanders over the mountains of 
Darkness, stumbling at every mote, sinking into every 
pit; pitiable in his desolate but unconscious captivity. 
But the Earth, though of a perishable fabric, and 
fading fast away, yet retains the primal texture and 
coloring with which it came from The Master’s Hand. 
Finitude and End are inscribed upon her Forehead, the 
Palms, and the Soles of her feet: And throughout all 
her Limits are scattered Medals, which could come only 
from the Mint of Mind and the Treasury of the Governing 
God. Of the beginning, behold, Matter destitute of 
every Letter foreign to its absolute self, void, dead forged 
from the labouring Anvil, when Time was called to be. 
And in the Transition Rocks, the semblance of his first¬ 
born day, mute, solitary, and unadorned; Chaos sup¬ 
porting his infant head with Arm fast withering away : 
Vacuity and Gloom are round about; the Symbols of 
dull Earth, insensate, lifeless, droop over the vacated 
and erst but empty Throne of Chaos, dreamy, latent, 
dawning. Here Nature, and History, and Revelation 
are at one; Chimborazo, and Andes, and The Alps, 
Libanus, Brathys, and his Antipodes, and ten thousand 
fragments torn from their thunder-rifted Crowns, and 
hurled over the whole Globe by the exulting Deluge 
which blotted it out; and all Story of the Antique Time 
by Hermaic Chronicler, and Chaldean, or Priest-King, 
read in the sight of approving Heaven before the Con¬ 
gregation of Zion; I say, these all agree with, and 
justify one another, and serve to confound these Images 
of the Vain, and break them utterly in pieces. 
Nathless, the Spirit of the Age, though confessedly 
baffled, yea, driven from a favourite Fastness, has many 
subterfuges in reserve; unable longer to gainsay these 
accumulative facts; in his own esteem a second Archi¬ 
medes, himself the Lever by which the Foundations of 
the World shall be moved, like a wretch in hot fever, he 
rusheth naked upon Death, in conflict with Spectres of 
his restless crazy brain. Questioning the recorded order 
of Creation, he classifies the Rocks which contain Or¬ 
ganic Remains, and boldly avers, that animal and vege¬ 
table life were from the first cotemporaneous, contrary to 
the Letter of that Sacred Text, by which alone we can 
arrive at the rationale of Creation. He ransacks whole 
Continents, and triumphantly points to unnumbered 
Skeletons disinterred from Strata with a Granitic Base: 
forgetful that, long after the separation of dry land, an 
Ocean remained, whose Profound no light could possibly 
penetrate, by which alone vegetables exist, to which would 
descend with precipitates the reliquiae of every thing 
dying over its area: and oblivious of the fact, that the 
Coal Measures of Virginia do actually repose upon 
Granite, and other inorganic Matter of the same Age. 
To say nothing of the intrinsic value of the acknow¬ 
ledged Truth, that the Crinoidea and other Marine Co¬ 
rallines, of which some of the earliest fossiliferous 
Rocks are mainly composed, lived like their yet surviving 
congeners in the deepest Caverns of the Sea, in places to 
which vegetation was of course unknown. And the Coal 
itself, which the Modern Julian seeks, hoping there to 
find, beside its vegetable component parts, relics of the 
Creature that had life,—from whence he toils to extort 
hope, explodes the moment the rash Experimentalist 
applies his Crucible, and sorely mangles him withal. 
For no causes now in action, none of the Forces of actual 
Nature are anything like sufficient for the accumulation 
of that vast vegetable Foecula, before which, the ag¬ 
gregative “ timber-rafts” of Orinoko, and all the other 
mighty American Rivers, multiplied twice a thousand, 
shrink into bagatelle. And mark ye now, O reader, the 
Times of the Creation were long Periods, of which the 
first commenced with “ light,” and the third, or Floral, 
ended with the same; the “ Light” being distinct from 
that of the Sun, the corollary and consequence should be, 
and are found in the Elder Coal fields, verily formed of 
boundless Genera and Species erased from the Book of 
Life. Certain pious and really orthodox Writers, misled 
by the frequent apparition of animal remains in Strata 
immediately subsequent to Granite, forgetful, too, of the 
perfect Measure of the Word of Jehovah, have curiously 
taken the visual organs of Trilobites, and of other extinct 
Crustaceans, in the forlorn chance of finding a constitu¬ 
tion there, differing from the one which holds the same 
Family in the present generation. Their researches vin¬ 
dicate The Text, but in a contrary way their short-sighted 
and erring Faith would have it; had these fossil eyes 
contained a rudiment opposed to the light of the Sun, as 
now exercised, the Key-stone of Scripture were loosened 
in its place. It is unequivocally written, and the Sacred 
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