etation," as Dr Macculloch calls them, "the lichens, and other
analogous plants, seek their place where no others could exist; demanding
no water, requiring no soil, careless alike of cold and heat, of the sun
and of the storm; rootless, leafless, flowerless; clothing the naked rock,
and forming additional soil for their successors." The whole tribe of
corals, whose lives are sufficiently brief and sufficiently simple, are
yet not permitted to die away from the scene, and leave it, as so many of
us do, just as they found it; they build up such a mausoleum of their
bones--(for what used to be considered as the shell of the animal, is now
pronounced to be a sort of bony nucleus or skeleton)--that large islands
are formed, and a corresponding displacement of the sea is occasioned. The
little creatures heave up the ocean on us. The river that to the poet's
eye flows on for ever in the same channel, "giving a kiss," and kisses
only, to every pebble and every sedge "it overtaketh in its pilgrimage,"
is detected to be secretly scraping, abrading, cutting out the earth like
a knife, and washing it away into the sea. On the other hand, the
earthquake and the volcano, which were looked on as paroxysms and agonies
of nature, are transformed in our imagination into the constant ministers
of beneficent change, and of creative purposes; and the momentary violence
they commit, is to be excused on the plea of the great and permanent good
they effect. For it is they who build the hills and the mountains, whence
flow the streams of abundance upon the earth, and which, instead of being
the gigantic, melancholy ruins Bishop Burnet took them to be, are the
palaces and storehouses of nature, which it is given in charge to these
sons of Vulcan to construct and to repair from the ravages which the soft
rains of heaven incessantly commit upon them.

Astronomy, too, notwithstanding the severe discipline she has undergone,
has in these later times resumed all the boldness of her youth, and
brought her stores of science to the construction of the most splendid
cosmogony that ever attracted the faith of the learned. She has girt her
long robe around her, and entered the lists with, and far outstripped,
whatever is boldest in the speculations of the youngest of the sciences.
The nebular hypothesis, though not yet entitled, as we think, to be
considered other than an hypothesis, has assumed a shape and consistency
which forbids an entire rejection of i