nites of the
Secondary ages, and the trilobites of the Palaeozoic ones, these series
have been made with great care, in order to prevent the erroneous
multiplication of species,--and that, in short, every richly
fossiliferous stratum in the earth's crust repeats the lesson so often
deduced from our churchyards, where graves of all sizes, from that of
the infant of a day to that of the aged adult, may be found lying side
by side. What the English clergyman represents as "the constant language
of geologists," is a language which _no_ geologist ever yet used, or
ever will. And his inference is in every way worthy of his premises. The
flourish with which he concludes his pamphlet would be infinitely
amusing had his language been just a little less solemn. "The writer of
the above remarks has felt it his duty," we find him saying, "to publish
them, not only to refute the arguments of the vain and puffed-lip
geologist, who fancies himself wiser than God, but also to prevent, by
God's blessing, the evil that must ensue from tampering with the sacred
text. And now, what has Satan to say? Why, THE TABLES ARE TURNED. Let
men beware. Why did not the British Association, at their twenty-third
meeting, in September, 1853, acknowledge their error as a body, in
applauding so loudly the assertion of one of their geological members at
a previous meeting, that this earth existed ages before man? They may
now have the satisfaction of thinking that, in spite of themselves,
those impious plaudits have been turned by the wrath of God into
hisses." Strange as the fact may seem, this passage was written, not in
grave joke, but in serious earnest.

The belief that fossil remains had never entered into the composition
of living organisms, but had been formed in the rocks just as we find
them, gradually gave place, during the seventeenth century, to the
belief that they were the debris of the Noachian Deluge, and evidences,
as they occurred in almost every known country, and were found on the
top of lofty hills, of at once its universality and the height to which
its waters had prevailed. And this hypothesis, like the others, has been
reproduced by some of the anti-geologists of the present day. The known
fact,--a result of modern science,--that the several formations (always
invariable in their order of succession) have their groups of organisms
peculiar to themselves, has, however, interposed a difficulty from which
the earlier cosmogonists wer