J821.J Strictures on Professor Buckland's Inaugural Lecture. 301 
is given exactly the same as that for 
high water in the Mersey at Runcorn. 
I should feel particularly obliged to 
Mr. Galton, if he would state whether 
those heights are made out from the 
actual rise and fall of the canals that 
connect those rivers, or are they only 
assumed to be the same. 
The Arun and Wey Canal appears to 
offer the means of connecting the canal 
levels with the sea on the southern 
coast; but 1 have not been able to find 
any information on the rises and falls 
on that line of canal, except that the 
Wey at Guildford Bridge is 86feet 
above the Thames at Ham Haw. Are 
any of your readers in possession of the 
rise and fall from Guildford to the sea 
in Arundel Bay? W. Watson. 
Dorset Street, Sept. 1821. 
To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. 
SIR, 
N Professor Buckland’s eloquent 
inaugural lecture, read at Oxford, 
in May, 1819, on the connection of 
geology with our religious principles, 
and which only lately came into my 
hands, I find a passage that, with all 
due difference to sucii high authority, 
1 cannot give my assent to, especially 
as to me it appears that the expression 
militates against the traditions of Moses, 
without sufficient grounds or any ne¬ 
cessity whatever. 
It is as follows: 44 We find the pri¬ 
mitive rocks on the greater portion of 
the earth’s surface (that is rocks which 
contain no remains of animal or vege¬ 
table life, or fragments of other rocks) 
covered by an accumulation of deriva¬ 
tive or secondary strata, the great per¬ 
pendicular thickness of which cannot 
he estimated at less than two miles. 
44 These strata do not appear to have 
been deposited hastily and suddenly ; 
on the contrary the phenomena atten¬ 
dant on them are such as prove that 
their formation was slow and gradual; 
going on during successive periods of 
tranquillity and great disturbance, and 
being in some cases entirely produced 
fiom the destruction of more ancient 
rocks, which had been consolidated and 
again broken up by violent convulsions, 
antecedent to the deposition of these 
more modern and secondary strata, 
which are sometimes in great measure 
derived from their exuviae.” 
And this opinion is afterwards endea¬ 
voured to be supported on the authority 
* Rees’s Cyclopedia, article canal. 
of the hypothesis of Bishop Horsley, 
who chooses to suppose that the days of 
the Mosaic creation are not to be strictly 
construed as employing the same length 
of time which is at present occupied 
by a single rotation of our globe, but 
periods of much longer extent; and 
also on another hypothesis, which sup¬ 
poses the word beginning, as applied by 
Moses in the first book of Genesis, to 
express an undefined period of time, 
which was antecedent to the last great 
change that affected the surface of the 
earth, and to the creation of its present 
animal and vegetable inhabitants ; dur¬ 
ing whioli period, a long series of ope¬ 
rations and revolutions may have been 
going on. 
Now, it appears to me, that neither 
of these hypotheses is necessary to 
account for what is related by Moses, 
and still within the reach of discovery. 
It will be recollected, perhaps, that 
in my Essay on the undoubted marks 
of the Noatic flood having been uni¬ 
versal, published in the Monthly Ma¬ 
gazine for the months of August, Sep¬ 
tember, and October, 1815, I founded 
my observations on the very evident 
traces of that destructive inundation 
which every where at this day present 
themselves to our enquiring eyes, not¬ 
withstanding the veil which vegetation 
has extended over the bounds of the 
earth’s surface; and that I rested my 
conviction of the event not only on the 
present appearance of the surface, and 
the internal as well as external altera¬ 
tion which must have been effected by 
the action and re-action of the tides'. 
but on the exactly similar consequences 
which would ensue were this planet to 
be again submerged by his decree who 
created the original material out of 
which it was formed. Now, as I firmly 
believe that the whole of the universe, 
both dense and fluid, composed of mat¬ 
ter, owes its origin to chemical laws 
which the great architect has thought 
fit to impose on it for his own wise 
and inscrutable purposes, so I can see 
nothing improbable in his having pro¬ 
duced by his irresistible fiat in any 
given space of time, (such as he lias 
allowed us to measure our short exist¬ 
ence by) any number of worlds: much 
less that he should have recomposed our 
globe by that word, which was God, 
even instantaneously —-for the measure¬ 
ment of periods couid only be necessary 
to make us comprehend its duration, 
not to its primordial existence; and 1 
trusty I shall be justified in saying wc 
ought 
