CHAPTER III. THE ORDEAL BY FIRE. IT required a century to gain the credence of the world to the suggestion of Fracastoro. This point gained, it took a century and a half to overthrow the popular belief that the inhumation of fossil remains was all effected at the time of the Mosaic deluge. But few observations of the nature of those already cited had, at this period, been made. With our present knowledge of the oscillations which are going on in the comparative level of continents and oceans, he would seem to be beyond the reach of argument who can still deny that our beautiful prairies have, for ages instead of months, been the bed of a sea which rolled its surges from the Adirondacks on the east to the Sierra Nevada on the west. Admitting the deluge of Noah to have been universal, were the agencies in operation during the one hundred and fifty days of its continuance sufficiently energetic to accumulate sediments twenty miles in thickness in that brief period? Such a conclusion is contradicted by all our observations, instead of being sustained by them. These stratified rocks cover nineteen twentieths of the earth's surface; and the material for them has been ground from the rocky shores of ancient islands and continents by the beating of the waves. If they have thus been distributed by the action of water, it has been a slow process. Admitting, then, the Noachian deluge to have been universal, and to have covered the mountains-since they also are made of fossiliferous strata, even to the altitude of eight thousand feet-is it likely that a hundred thousand feet of sediments would have been deposited in one hundred and fifty days, or at the rate of one eighth of a mile a day? Consider, also, the myriads of organic remains entombed in these sediments. Their number is fifteen or twenty times as great as that of all existing animals. No evidence exists that the waters of the Mosaic flood were so immensely populous, nor that they were endowed with such destructive energy, as to sweep from existence cubic miles of aquatic forms. And, lastly, it will be noted that four fifths, at least, of the fossil species are now extinct; and, if they were exterminated by the deluge, the objector to geological teaching trips his own feet, for Moses says that Noah preserved pairs of "all flesh wherein is the breath of life, and of thing that is in the earth." The objector asserts that these animals, now admitted to be extinct, were living at the time of the Deluge, and were exterminated by that event. The sacred historian asserts that the animals living at the time of the Deluge were preserved from extinction by the hand. of Noah. every Equally improbable and equally illogical is the position of certain petrified philosophers, who maintain that God created every portion of the earth's crust as we find it. We must thus ignore the indications of every one of a myriad of facts. As well deny that human hands built the Roman aqueduct, or made the pottery exhumed from buried cities or Indian mounds. As well avow our disbelief that Vesuvius ejected the lavas which incrust its sides -that the lightning has struck the riven oak-that the pebble upon the sea-shore has been rounded by the action of the waves-or that the vacated shell by its side was, not long since, the home of an animal enjoying its existence in the brine. Such a belief is to contradict all appearances to reject that which is most probable and al most demonstrable for that which is contrary to all observation. The geological doctrine is not to deny the unlimited power of Deity, for nothing has done more than geology to unfold and demonstrate that power. It is to apply the same reasoning to geological facts as we apply to other phenomena. In the material world, and within the scope of our investigation, we witness no result which is not the effect of the antecedent energy of what we call secondary causes, operating according to established methods. Whatever can be accounted for by reference to such modes of operation, we feel ourselves precluded from attributing to an extraordinary and miraculous agency. In view of the facts, therefore, we regard it as certain that a large part of the solid crust of our globe has passed through an ablution in the sea. Particle by particle, grain by grain, pebble by pebble, has been worn from the preexisting rocks; and, after being rolled to and fro for ages by the surges of the sea, has found its way to the deep and quiet ocean-bed. There layers innumerable haye been piled upon it. Some of the agencies of Nature have solidified these vast accumulations of sediment; an earthquakethroe has resulted in the birth of a continent, over which the mighty mutations of a geological epoch have swept in grandeur which no human eye was yet created to contemplate; then, in the preappointed order of Providence, man came upon the earth; and to-day, after the lapse of an interval of time which, to human apprehension, is infinite, we split open the solid layer, and behold! the very pebble of granite which was loosed from the primitive rock in the dim ages of the earth's history, which reach far back into the eternity of God! And by its side is a form—an animal form-clearly an animal form; but, if we search the world through, we shall not find its like among existing beings. It is a strange and uncouth form. It was one of |