commercial greatness, and the cheerful blaze of its many millions of
domestic hearths, from the unprecedentedly luxurious flora of the old
carboniferous ages. Truly, very wonderful are the coal fields of
Northern America! If geologists inferred, as they well might, that the
extinct flora which had originated the European coal vastly outrivalled
in luxuriance that of the existing time, what shall be said of that
flora of the same age which originated the coal deposits of Nova Scotia
and the United States,--deposits _twenty times as great_ as all those of
all Europe put together!

[17] Such is also the view taken by the author of a recently published
work, "The Genesis of the Earth and of Man." "Christian philosophers
have been compelled to acknowledge," says this writer, "that the Mosaic
account of creation is only reconcileable with demonstrated facts, by
its being regarded as a record of _appearances_; and if so, to vindicate
the truth of God, we must consider it, so far as the acts are concerned,
as the relation of a revelation to the _sight_, which was sufficient for
all its purposes, rather than as one in words; though the words are
perfectly true as describing the revelation itself, and the revelation
is equally true as showing man the principal phenomena which he would
have seen had it been possible for him to be a witness of the events.
Further, if we view the narrative as the description of a series of
visions, while we find it to be perfectly reconcileable with the
statement in other parts of Scripture, that in six days the Lord made
heaven and earth, we remove, with other difficulties, the only strong
objection to the opinion of those who regard the 'six days' as periods
of undeflnable duration, and who may even believe that we are now in the
'seventh day,'--the day of rest or of cessation from the work of
creation. Certainly, 'the day of God,' and 'the day of the Lord,' and
the 'thousand two hundred and threescore days,' of the Revelation of St.
John, and the 'seventy weeks' in the Prophecy of Daniel, are not to be
understood in their primary and natural senses," &c., &c.

[18] "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all
that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed
the Sabbath day, and hallowed it."

[19] Forbes and Hanley enumerate one hundred and sixty bivalves, and two
hundred and thirty-two univalves,--in all three hundred and ninety-two
species, as the