ly modern time the lower lands of Upper
Canada were submerged beneath the level of the ocean, and that a series
of deep seas, connected by broad sounds, occupied the place of the great
lakes. Not until the last upheaval of the land was the river now known
as the St. Lawrence called into existence, to begin its work of
excavation; and ere that event took place, fully ten miles of
fossiliferous rock had been deposited on the earth's surface, charged
with the remains of many succeeding creations. The deposit through which
the St. Lawrence is slowly mining its way is older than the river itself
by the vast breadth of the four Tertiary periods, by that of all the
Secondary ages,--Cretaceous, Oolitic, and Triassic,--by the periods,
too, of the Permian system, of the Carboniferous system, of the Old Red
system, and of the uppermost beds of the Upper Silurian system. But a
simple illustration may better serve to show the true character of the
conclusion urged here by the opponent of Sir Charles, than any such line
of statement as that which I employ, however clear to the geologist. In
the year 1817, Prince's Street, in Edinburgh, was opened up to the
Calton Hill, and the Calton burying-ground cut through to the depth of
many feet by the roadway. Let us suppose that when the excavation has
been carried a hundred yards into the cemetery, a geologist, finding the
laborers cutting on the average about a yard per day, simply intimates
as his opinion that the laborers have been a hundred days at work. "No,"
replies a controversialist on the anti-geological side; "for the first
fifty yards, so soft was the subsoil, and so shallow the covering of
mould, that the laborers must have cut at the rate of two yards a day;
it has been merely for the last fifty yards that they have been
excavating at the present slow rate: they cannot have been more than
seventy-five days at work. I marvel exceedingly at the absurdity of
geological reasoners: _palpably the burying-ground of the Calton is only
seventy-five days old._" Now, such, in no exaggerated, but, on the
contrary, greatly modified form, is the argument that would limit the
age of the earth to the period during which the St. Lawrence has been
scooping out a channel for itself, from Queenston to Niagara, through an
ancient Silurian burying-ground. Both arguments alike confound the age
of the ancient burying-grounds with the date of the modern excavations
opened up through them; but in order to