American tribes before the discovery of America by Columbus.

As a geologist, and as one who has been in the main of the school of
Lyell, and after having observed with much care the deposits of the
more modern periods on both sides of the Atlantic, I have from the
first dissented from those of my scientific brethren who have
unhesitatingly given their adhesion to the long periods claimed for
human history, and have maintained that their hasty conclusions on
this subject must bring geological reasoning into disrepute, and react
injuriously on our noble science. We require to make great demands on
time for the prehuman periods of the earth's history, but not more
than sacred history is willing to allow for the modern or human age.

CHAPTER XV.

COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS.

"Lo, these are but the outlines of his ways, and how faint
the whisper which we hear of him--the thunder of his power
who could understand?"--Job xxvi., 14.

In the preceding pages I have, as far as possible, avoided that mode
of treating my subject which was wont to be expressed as the
"reconciliation" of Scripture and Natural Science, and have followed
the direct guidance of the Mosaic record, only turning aside where
some apt illustration or coincidence could be perceived. In the
present chapter I propose to inquire what the science of the earth
teaches on these same subjects, and to point out certain manifest and
remarkable correspondences between these teachings and those of
revelation. Here I know that I enter on dangerous ground, and that if
I have been so fortunate as to carry the intelligent reader with me
thus far, I may chance to lose him now. The Hebrew Scriptures are
common property; no one can fairly deny me the right to study them,
even though I do so in no clerical or theological capacity; and even
if I should appear extreme in some of my views, or venture to be
almost as enthusiastic as the commentators of Homer, Shakespeare, or
Dante, I can not be very severely blamed. But the direct comparison of
these ancient records with results of modern science is obnoxious to
many minds on different grounds; and all the more so that so few men
are at once students both of nature and revelation. There are, as
yet, but few even of educated men whose range of study has included
any thing that is practical or useful either in Hebrew literature or
geological science. That slipshod Christianity which contents itself
wit