n a more or less perfect
state, no inconsiderable portion of all the forms yet detected in the
rocks of her earlier Palaeozoic and Secondary floras.

It will be seen that I adopt, in my Third and Fourth Lectures, that
scheme of reconciliation between the Geologic and Mosaic Records which
accepts the six days of creation as vastly extended periods; and I have
been reminded by a somewhat captious critic that I once held a very
different view, and twitted with what he terms inconsistency. I
certainly did once believe with Chalmers and with Buckland that the six
days were simply natural days of twenty-four hours each,--that they had
compressed the entire work of the existing creation,--and that the
latest of the geologic ages was separated by a great chaotic gap from
our own. My labors at the time as a practical geologist had been very
much restricted to the Palaeozoic and Secondary rocks, more especially
to the Old Red and Carboniferous Systems of the one division, and the
Oolitic System of the other; and the long extinct organisms which I
found in them certainly did not conflict with the view of Chalmers. All
I found necessary at the time to the work of reconciliation was some
scheme that would permit me to assign to the earth a high antiquity, and
to regard it as the scene of many succeeding creations. During the last
nine years, however, I have spent a few weeks every autumn in exploring
the later formations, and acquainting myself with their peculiar
organisms. I have traced them upwards from the raised beaches and old
coast lines of the human period, to the brick clays, Clyde beds, and
drift and boulder deposits of the Pleistocene era, and again from these,
with the help of museums and collections, up through the mammaliferous
crag of England, to its Red and its Coral crags. And the conclusion at
which I have been compelled to arrive is, that for many long ages ere
man was ushered into being, not a few of his humbler contemporaries of
the fields and woods enjoyed life in their present haunts, and that for
thousands of years anterior to even their appearance, many of the
existing molluscs lived in our seas. That day during which the present
creation came into being, and in which God, when he had made "the beast
of the earth after his kind, and the cattle after their kind," at length
terminated the work by moulding a creature in his own image, to whom he
gave dominion over them all, was not a brief period of a few hours'