those solemn moral problems connected with distant worlds. And even in relation to our own little world, we know but in part. There are questions, in relation to our very selves, which the wisdom of all ages has been baffled in attempting to answer; mysteries which the sounding line of reason has never yet been able to fathom, and probably never will. In the place of knowledge, however, we may have the repose of faith. Where certainty cannot be reached, there may be assurance as its valid substitute. One of the pillars of this faith is the wisdom of God. In our last paper it was shewn that geology blends its voice with those of all the other sciences in declaring the Divine wisdom,that, from the character of the materials, their proportions of quantity, their relative positions, and the postures into which the strata have been thrown, there is every reason to conclude that an infallible intelligence has planned the entire arrangement; so perfectly is it adapted to the wants of mankind. Our inference from this is an easy and a cheering one. If the successive creations and convulsions-the seemingly chaotic disorder of which the traces are so evident throughout the structure of the earth's crust, have all been directed by unerring wisdom to great and beneficent ends, we may rest assured that the same all-wise intelligence is still presiding over the vast plan of which this is but a part, disposing the respective strata of the world's history, and leading on each advancing stage of its development. So that, just as the earth's crust, after being whelmed in the floods and heaved by the volcanic fires, has become a treasury of wealth and a paradise of beauty-gold at its feet, and flowers on its brow,-the convulsions and seeming confusion of the moral scene shall answer great and glorious ends, and issue in a state of things which shall enrapture the pure intelligences of the universe, and be the theme of their admiration and praise for ever. To this result, the resources as well as the wisdom of God are adequate. This view of the Divine Being,-his all-sufficiency,-receives, we think, striking illustration from Geology. We infer this first, from the forces employed. Now the intensity and power with which some of these forces have operated require a moment's consideration. The action

of fire seems naturally to demand the first notice, as the earliest stage to which the geologist can trace the condition of the globe is that in which it was under the dominant control of the glowing element. Humboldt, who gives the result of extensive personal observation as well as research, states, that the propagation of earthquakes (produced by the action of the internal fires upon gaseous bodies), is most generally effected by undulations in a linear direction, with a velocity of from twenty to twenty-eight miles in a minute, decreasing from the centre of commotion towards the circumference. The force which can thus make the immense superincumbent mass of strata quiver, and transmit the convulsions it produces at a rate so amazingly swift, is evidently beyond human calculation. It has been computed that the shock of the great earthquake which destroyed the city of Lisbon, on the 1st of November, 1755, pervaded an area of 700,000 miles, or the twelfth part of the circumference of the globe. This dreadful shock lasted only five minutes. "In some of the most fearful earthquakes on record, the noise, analogous to the report of a cannon when discharged, has been heard not simultaneously with the shock which produced the catas

trophe, but fifteen or twenty minutes after it. Reasoning from the laws which regulate the transmission of sound, we must conclude that the shock originates from a vast depth beneath the surface, and other striking facts confirm the conclusion. How tremendous the force which from such a depth can produce a concussion by which thirty thousand persons, as in Lisbon, were buried in a few moments beneath the ruins of the churches, or two hundred and fifty thousand, as in Antioch, in the year 526, crushed by the falling houses or swallowed by the opening earth! Volcanic phenomena are equally striking proofs of the terrible force of this agent. The buried cities at the foot of Vesuvius; the flowing from Shaptar Jokul, in Iceland, of one stream of lava sixty miles long and twelve broad; another forty miles long and seven broad, with each an average thickness of a hundred feet;-and the occurrence of explosions, as in Sumbawa, one of the Molucca Islands, in 1815, which were heard in one direction upwards of nine hundred, and in another upwards of seven hundred miles, whilst cinders and ashes fell by which houses were destroyed at the distance of forty miles, and which strewed the ocean at the distance of hundreds of miles to the thickness of two feet;-attest sufficiently the sublime and awful power of this element.

Another of the leading geological agents is water. And, whilst the contrast of fire in its mode of operation, it is, under certain conditions, equally destructive and irresistible. It can wear down the hardest rocks. In the district of Auvergne, in central France, the waters have worn through masses of rock to the depth of upwards of one hundred and fifty feet. At the Falls of Niagara the water has, by its abrading power, worn for itself a channel half a mile broad, and several miles in length. Still more stupendous are the effects produced by the action of the waters of the ocean. Lashed into fury by the tempest and driven violently against the coast, it hollows out caverns in the hardest rocks. Thus, Fingal's cave, in the island of Staffa, two hundred and twenty-seven feet in length, and from fifty to a hundred feet high, with its splendid basaltic columns, has been scraped out by the ceaseless action of the breakers at the base of the cliff. By this force, islands have been worn to rocky skeletons-as the Needles of the Isle of Wight; and where proud castles and smiling villages once stood, the land, even from our own coasts, has been extensively swept away. Taking into account the vast volume of the ocean's waters, covering as they do three-fourths of the earth's surface, ever restless, and often lashed into fury by the storm, dashing against their boundaries with all their majestic might, age after age, we cannot readily over-estimate the force of this agent in the processes of geology. Water, even in the form of ice, has effected geological changes to no ordinary extent. Not to mention the stupendous masses of ice in the polar regions, the glacial seas, and rocks embosomed or enthroned among the Alps, form a most interesting study. The Alpine glaciers are supposed to cover about four hundred miles of surface, being about four hundred in number, but of greatly unequal dimensions. These strange masses, rigid as they seem, are ever in motion-changing every moment, incessantly dissolving and renewed, and in their flow and change are ever producing an effect on the materials with which

they come in contact; carrying down with them countless fragments, and often large masses of earth and rock. Glaciers and their action have been in former periods much more widely extended than they now are. Vast quantities of rocks, including many blocks of enormous size, are found at the distance of hundreds of miles from their parent rocks, wide valleys intervening between their present position and their native beds; and glaciers appear to have been the only agents by which they could have been removed.

As our space will not permit us to dwell upon atmospheric, chemical, and electrical agents, we proceed to remark that all these forces have been subordinated, controlled, and used instrumentally. The condition into which both the crust and the surface of the globe have been brought should be regarded as amply sufficient evidence of this. It appears, however, from the process as well as from the result. The fiery element has consolidated the sedimentary deposits, has crystallised the earthy chalk and limestone into marble-providing materials for solid and ornamental architecture-has turned clay into the blue slate with which houses are roofed, has powerfully assisted in preparing the exhaustless mineral treasures of the globe for the use of man; and by its upheaving force has placed them within his reach; whilst without this force, terrible as it seems, the earth would be an inanimate, clay-cold corpse, without a crystal, or a metal, or a gem in its bosom, or a flush of beauty on its surface, incapable as it must have been, of vegetable life, the agency of fire has made it the repository of all splendid and precious things, the genial soil of an exuberant vegetation, and a suitable abode for countless myriads of living tribes. And even the volcano, with its appalling outburst, hinting as it does the power within which might easily become the instrument of universal destruction, is itself a safety-valve, permitting the earth to secure the all-important influences of this essential element, secure, on the whole, from those under ravages to which it would otherwise be subject.

Water, again, is equally subordinate and serviceable. Its wild violence is effectively controlled, its occasional destructive action is but partial and exceptional, whilst the modes in which it has been conducive to what was evidently the Divine purpose, the preparation of earth to be the theatre of life, are numberless and invaluable. It has encountered the Plutonic element, repressed its consuming fierceness, and yoked it as its own fellow-worker in the service of the world. But for the incessant action of water, the strata of the earth's crust could have had no existence. And the characters and uses of those strata bear striking and incontrovertible witness that whilst its violence has been but occasional, and its destructive action incidental, its influences in immense preponderance have been kindly and beneficent. It has been a fountain of beauty, a minister of life and happiness, an instrument in the hand of our Divine architect in the construction of the wondrous fabric which has become the residence of man. It is, indeed, most beautiful to observe that this element, which can toss the leviathan war-ship like a feather on its own foam, has, in the vast geological eras, been the soft bosom at which life the most minute and tranquil has been nursed to an inconceivable extent. Rude and ungovernable as the nurse seems in some of her moods to have been, she has, on the whole, nourished an

offspring more numerous than the sands on the sea-shore, with a tenderness and a gentleness to which, from their sepulchres of a dateless antiquity, they still bear witness. Upon the present uses of this element we need not dwell for a moment. Without the ocean, rivers, and springs, what a scene of desolation our globe would instantly become! Even the glaciers in their dread solitudes, dangerous and occasionally destructive as they are, "in their results are clear and extensive demonstrations of the infinite wisdom and bountiful goodness of the Creator. God commands his sun to rise upon the eternal snow, and to melt the crystal glacier, and makes them to contribute of their hidden stores, drops, and rills, and streams, and torrents, to form rivers that shall spread fertility, beauty, and wealth over fields and meadows."* "He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills. Thou visitest the earth and waterest it: thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God; thou preparest them corn, when thou hast so provided for it. Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof. Thou crownest the year with thy goodness, and thy paths drop fatness. They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing."†

The chemistry of geology is a department of the science which has been less explored than its mechanical agencies and operations. Though not so perfectly investigated, however, it is not less important. Chemical agencies endow with special properties the inorganic masses of the earth's crust, and thus fit them to perform their mysterious offices in relation to the inorganic world, in the production of the boundless diversity of vegetable and animal forms. The globe and its atmosphere are a grand laboratory in which the processes of a wondrous chemistry have been carried on through countless ages. And if the man would be thought insane who, when witnessing the brilliant experiments of modern chemistry should pronounce the discoveries and achievements of a Davy, a Black, a Berzelius, or a Liebig, the results of mere accident, what must be thought of those who see not the will, the wisdom, and the power of a Divine operator, in results which the triumphant genius of these masters of the science can follow only at a dim and unapproachable distance?

As striking an evidence as any other that the geological forces are servants and not masters, is the fact that they work harmoniously. How strangely unlike each other! How opposite in their nature and effects! And yet none of them lords it in supremacy over the rest, nor refuses its co-operation with them. The fire does not dissipate the waters into unreduceable vapour; nor does the water with all its oceans quench the central fires. Chemistry does not dissolve the matter of our globe into one only kind of substance, but works its transforming magic within the limits of a beautiful utility-in weight and measure. Electricity does not gain strength to shatter, by any succession of tremendous shocks, the compacted globe into fragments, but shoots its Dr. Jenkyn. "Popular Educator."

Psalm, civ. 10; lxv. 9-13. See also Job, chapters xxxvii, and xxxviii

quickening influence through the solid mass, charging it in beautifully balanced proportion, and fitting it to respond effectively to the summons of man. Can that Being be less than all-sufficient who could evoke into existence powers such as these, yoke them to the car of his purposes, and guide them whither, and in what order it pleased him? To have such agencies at command as those of which geology bears record, and to have so swayed and employed them, is evidence of the possession of resources without limits. A power less than omnipotence would have feared to call them into existence, had this been possible, lest it should be unable to govern them, as the magician may be mastered by his own spells; but the fires were kindled, the floods poured, and every other force and agent sent on its subtle way, with the sublime confidence of their entire subserviency, the conscious omnipotence to which all created forces are as nothing.

Of life as an agent of geological change, vastly important and interesting as it is, our limits have forbidden us to take account. The abundance and variety of organic products, must however be glanced at as a rich exhibition of the all-sufficiency of God. Vast and magnificent as is the present vegetable system, there have been periods of far more prolific growth, as the coal beds, the seemingly inexhaustible fuel-stores of the world, bear witness. The extinct vegetable worlds, however, from the softer and more perishable character of their materials, have not left their traces in the crust of the earth to the same extent as the animal tribes. The extent to which the relics of animal existence are deposited in the strata, is calculated to fill the mind with amazement and awe. That "the very earth on which we tread once lived," is not the mere fancy of the poet, but the sober fact of the geologist. Dr. Mantell, one of the most distinguished explorers in this interesting field, says, that " probably there is not an atom of the solid materials of the globe which had not passed through the complex and wonderful laboratory of life." The resources which could originate and sustain life to the inconceivable extent of which the structure of the globe is the monumental record, are clearly incapable of exhaustion. But there is another interesting proof of the limitless wealth of those resources. It is the variety of the forms of life. Not only is there an all but infinite number of individuals, there is a multiplicity of species equally astonishing. "As we ascend from the first few species of the Snowdon slates, to the hundreds of species in the silurian formations, and number almost by thousands in the oolite, and by thousands on thousands as we pass through the tertiary, till we emerge amidst the hundreds of thousands of now existing species, we are struck not merely with additions but with changes. Species, genera, whole groups of animals come in and die out, to be replaced and followed by others in turn. Four times, at least, do these changes take place in the course of the tertiary era, and to an extent which leaves hardly a species of the first period extant among the species now living. Of testaceous creatures, for example, the conchologist finds about seven thousand living species. But of these he finds only one or two among the four thousand fossil kinds, by the time he has descended to the chalk formation. General analogies of structure and adaptation remain, but the species are all changed. Of fishes, the