d, on both sides of the
Atlantic, in what used to be termed of old in Scotland "the chair of
verity;" and there they sometimes succeed in doing harm, all
unwittingly, not to the science which they oppose, but to the religion
which they profess to defend. I was not a little struck lately by
finding in a religious periodical of the United States, a worthy
Episcopalian clergyman bitterly complaining, that whenever his sense of
duty led him to denounce from his pulpit the gross infidelity of modern
geology, he could see an unbelieving grin rising on the faces of not a
few of his congregation. Alas! who can doubt that such ecclesiastics as
this good clergyman must virtually be powerful preachers on the
skeptical side, to all among their people who, with intelligence enough
to appreciate the geologic evidence, are still unsettled in their minds
respecting that of the Christian faith. And so on this consideration
alone it may be found not uninstructive to devote the address of the
present evening to an exposure of the errors and nonsense of our modern
anti-geologists,--the true successors and representatives, in the
passing age, of the Franciscan and Salamanca doctors of the fifteenth
and seventeenth centuries.

Let me first remark, that no one need expect to be original simply by
being absurd. There is a cycle in nonsense, as certainly as in opinion
of a more solid kind, which ever and anon brings back the delusions and
errors of an earlier time: the follies of the present day are
transcripts, unwittingly produced, and with of course a few variations,
of follies which existed centuries ago; and it seems to be on this
principle,--a consequence, mayhap, of the limited range of the human
mind, not only in its elucidations of truth, but also in its forms of
error,--that scarce an explanation of geologic phenomena has been given
by the anti-geologists of our own times, that was not anticipated by
writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was held, for
instance,--in opposition to the great painter, Leonardo da Vinci, who
flourished early in the sixteenth century, and was one of the first who,
after the revival of learning, asserted the true character of organic
remains,--that fossils were formed in the rocks through the planetary
influences, or a certain plastic force in nature, and had never entered
into the composition of living creatures or plants. And this view
obtained very generally till about the middle of the s