eologist takes up Sir
Charles;[44] and, after denouncing the calculation as "a stab at the
Christian religion," seeing it involves the assertion that the "Falls
were actually at Queenston four thousand years before the creation of
the world according to Moses," he brings certain facts, adduced both by
other writers and Sir Charles himself, to bear on the calculation, such
as the fact that the deep trench through which the Niagara runs is much
narrower in its lower than in its upper reaches, and that the river must
have performed its work of excavation, when the breadth was less, at a
greatly quicker rate than now. And thus the work of excavating the
trench is brought fairly within six thousand years. Nor is the principle
of the reasoning bad. In our illustration of the ditch excavated by the
laborer we of course take it for granted that it is a ditch of the same
depth and breadth throughout, and excavated in the same sort of soil;
for if greatly narrower and shallower at one place than at another, or
dug in a greatly softer mould, the rate of its excavation at different
times might be very different indeed, and the general calculation widely
erroneous, if based on the ratio of progress when it went on most
slowly, taken as an average ratio for the whole. But the anti-geologist
provokes only a smile when, in his triumph, he exultingly exclaims, "It
is on grounds such as these that the most learned and voluminous among
English geologists disputes the Mosaic history of the Creation and
Deluge,--a strong proof that even men of argument on other subjects
often reason in the most childish and ridiculous manner, and on grounds
totally false, when they undertake to deny the truth of the Holy
Scriptures." Now, it must be wholly unnecessary to remark here, that it
is surely one thing to "undertake to deny the truth of the Holy
Scriptures," and quite another and different thing to hold that the
Niagara Falls may have been at Queenston ten thousand years ago; or
further, that it seems not in the least wise to stake the truth of
Revelation on any such issue. Let me request you, however, to observe,
that in one important respect this writer resembles the former one. The
former, ignorant of the various phenomena exhibited by the great
deposits of Egypt, exhausted all his five thousand six hundred years of
available time in accounting for the formation of one of the least of
them,--the silt of the Nile; and the latter, though he bids dow