rock of which those deposits form such
definite, well-determined portions; besides the time necessary for the
production of the enormously developed Azoic rocks which lie under all!
The theologian, in this instance, instead of reasoning, as he himself
supposed, in behalf of the short chronology, has been making out a very
formidable case for the long one; and all that the geologist can have to
urge upon him in the circumstances is simply that he should act as he
holds the infidel ought to have done, and yield to the force of
evidence. I may mention in the passing, that some of the most ancient
buildings of Egypt are formed of the Tertiary marine limestones of the
country; the stones of the pyramids are charged with nummulites, known
to the Arabs as "Pharaoh's beans;" and these organisms stand out in high
relief on the weathered portions of the Great Sphinx. Some of the oldest
things in the world in their relation to human history,--erections, many
of which had survived the memory of their founders even in the days of
Herodotus,--are formed of materials so modern in their relation to the
geologic epochs, that they had no existence as rock until after the
Palaeozoic and Secondary ages had gone by. Not only the Carboniferous
sandstone of the High Church and Parliament House of Edinburgh, but even
the Oolitic (that is, Portland stone) of Somerset House and St. Paul's,
are of an antiquity incalculably vast compared with the stone out of
which the oldest of the pyramids were fashioned.

[Illustration: Fig. 116.

NUMMULITES LAEVIGATA.

(_Pharaoh's Beans._)]

The second example which I shall adduce is one with which many of my
auditors must be already familiar. The Falls of Niagara are gradually
eating their way through an elevated tract of table-land, upwards
towards Lake Erie, at the rate of about fifty yards in forty years; and
it has been argued by Sir Charles Lyell, that as they are now seven
miles distant from Queenston, where the elevation of the plateaux
begins, they must have taken about ten thousand years to scoop out their
present deep channel through that space.[43] Ten thousand years ago the
Falls were, he infers, at Queenston; and the grounds on which he reasons
are exactly those on which one would infer that a laborer who had cut a
ditch two hundred yards long at the rate of ten yards per day, and was
still at work without pause or intermission, had begun to cut it just
twenty days previous. A reverend anti-g