Exhibition—Annual Addresses. 
71 
then were great upheavals and subsidences, caused by internal fires 
and the unequal cooling of the earth’s crust, and vast mountain 
ranges, here and there over the continents of land, arose high up 
into the rarer and colder atmosphere of the sky, having spread out 
at their feet broad plains and deep valleys. 
The summits of these mountain ranges became the reservoirs and 
receptacles of condensed moisture, which a thousand winters con¬ 
verted into solid ice, lying in deep and ever-thickening masses on 
the peaks and in the crevices, which intervening and succeeding 
summers melted away, little by little, drop by drop, and yet more 
and more, until first the rill and then the rivulet, starting upon the 
mountain brow, go leaping and dancing and singing down its rugged 
sides, until they meet from a thousand ways in some deep depres¬ 
sion, w’here a lake is formed, which flows off in rivers, and these 
again commingling from those mighty and resistless flood streams, 
which wear down and cut through the solid rock, and then move on 
in quiet current, smooth and deep, across the plains and into the 
ocean gulfs. These rivers irrigate and make fruitful all the plains 
and valleys on their course; not as new and near sources of evapo¬ 
ration only, but by percolation and spreading moisture through and 
over wide surfaces beyond their beds, and vegetable life springs 
into being and has become the best fitted habitation of man and 
beast. 
These are the chosen regions of the earth, for population, for ag¬ 
riculture, and all the arts and amenities of civilized life. 
How grand, and how absolutely essential to the existence of the 
human race were these great and marvelous changes in the earth’s 
surface, which appear to the unthinking mind to be mere effects 
and consequences of accidental and fortuitous natural causes, set 
in motion hy molten and cooling and shrinking matter, and by the 
expansive force of the earth’s struggling gases. And yet, how 
clearly the design of God appears in all these movements and ap¬ 
parent changes of His universe by which he has fitted this earth for 
the habitation and sustenance of that strange being called man, 
whose body “ is of the earth, earthy,” but whose soul is of the 
essence of Deity. From the icy storehouses on the tops of the Alps 
and the Appennines, and the hardened snows and glaciers clinging 
to their serried sides, loosened and melted by the winds, heated by 
the burning deserts in Africa, blowing northward in the summer. 
