ur to lay them, with as
much brevity as they will allow, before my readers.

On that prochronic hypothesis, by which alone, as I conceive, the facts
revealed by geological investigation can be reconciled with the unerring
statements of Scripture,--every word of which is truth, the truth of a
"God that cannot lie,"--we may assume the actual creation of this earth
to have taken place at that period which is geologically known as the
later Tertiary Era, or thereabout. When, on the third day, "the waters
under the heaven were gathered together into one place, and the dry land
appeared," it is not necessary to suppose that the form assumed by the
emerging land was immediately that which it now has; we may, on the
other hand, I think, assume as likely, that successive or continuous
changes of elevation followed, which have been protracted, perhaps
constantly decreasing in extent and force, to the present hour.[2]

Perhaps between the six days' work of Creation and the Noachic Flood,
Europe became much altered in outline, and in elevation. It may have
been, at first, a great archipelago, agreeing with the epithet by which
it is designated in early Scripture, "the Isles,"[3] and by which it
was subsequently known for ages. The Pyrenees, the Alps, and the
Apennines, already emerged, were slowly uniting, and the Carpathians,
the Balkan, the Taurus, and the Caucasus, were uprearing, while the vast
regions to the north were still an expanse of open sea. England was
probably united with the newly-formed European continent, and embraced
Ireland in one great mass of unbroken land, which stretched far away
into the Atlantic. Volcanoes were active in the north of Ireland, and in
the west of Scotland, pouring forth those floods of fiery lava which
have cooled into the columnar forms seen at the Giant's Causeway and the
Cave of Fingal. Slowly the north of Europe emerged, and the great
south-west expanse of Britain sank beneath the sea, leaving, it may be,
the large island of Atlantis in mid-ocean, to be submerged by a later
catastrophe.

Probably changes very similar were coevally taking place in Asia and
North America, while the vast flat alluvial regions of South America
were, perhaps, even still more recently formed, and a great Pacific
continent was in course of subsidence, of which Australasia and
Polynesia are the existing remains.

Such changes of elevation, and of the continuity of land, must effect
considerable alterations of