render the argument of my
illustration equally absurd with the other, it would be not only
necessary to infer that the Calton cemetery was only seventy-five days
old, but also that the rock on which it rested was no older.

But enough of follies such as these! I had marked a good many other
passages of similar character in the writings of the recent
anti-geologists, and would have little difficulty in filling a volume
with such; but it would be a useless, though mayhap curious work, and is
much better exhibited by specimen than as a whole. A little folly is
amusing, but much of it fatigues. There is a time coming, and now not
very distant, when the vagaries of the anti-geologists will be as
obsolete as those of the geographers of Salamanca, or as those of the
astronomers who upheld the orthodoxy of Ptolemy against Galileo and
Newton; and when they will be regarded as a sort of curious fossils,
very monstrous and bizarre, and altogether of an extinct type, but which
had once not only life, but were formidable. It will then be seen by all
what a noble vestibule the old geologic ages form to that human period
in which moral responsibility first began upon earth, and a creature
destined to immortality anticipated an eternal hereafter. There is
always much of the mean and the little in the worlds which man creates
for himself, and in the history which he gives them. Of all the
abortions of the middle ages which have come down to us, I know not a
more miserable one,--at once ludicrous and sad,--than that heavens and
earth of Cosmas _Indicopleustes_, the monk, which I illustrated by
diagrams in my last lecture (Figs. 114, 115). They are just such heavens
and earth as a monk might have made, and made too at a sitting. The
heavens, represented as a solid arch raised on tall walls, resemble, as
a whole, the arch which figures in the middle of a freemason's apron,
or, more homely still, the section of a wine cellar; while the earth
lies beneath as a great plain or floor, with a huge hill in the
distance, behind which the sun passes when it is night. And yet this
scheme gave law to the world for more than six centuries, and lay like a
nightmare on physical discovery, astronomic and geographical. The
anti-geologists have been less mischievous, for they live in a more
enlightened age; and we already see but the straggling remains of the
body, and know that the time cannot be far distant when it will be as
completely extinct as any o