he, "who considers that
on digging into the earth, such quantities of shells, and in some
places, bones and horns of animals, are found sound and entire, after
having lain there in all probability some thousands of years; it should
seem probable that guns, medals, and implements in metal or stone, might
have lasted entire, buried under ground forty or fifty thousand years,
if the world had been so old. How comes it then to pass that no remains
are found, no antiquities of those numerous ages preceding the Scripture
accounts of time; that no fragments of buildings, no public monuments,
no intaglios, cameos, statues, basso-relievos, medals, inscriptions,
utensils, or artificial works of any kind, are ever discovered, which
may bear testimony to the existence of those mighty empires, those
successions of monarchs, heroes, and demi-gods, for so many thousand
years? Let us look forward and suppose ten or twenty thousand years to
come, during which time we will suppose that plagues, famine, wars, and
_earthquakes_ shall have made great havoc in the world, is it not highly
probable that at the end of such a period, pillars, vases, and statues
now in being, of granite, or porphyry, or jasper (stones of such
hardness as we know them to have lasted two thousand years above ground,
without any considerable alteration), would bear record of these and
past ages? Or that some of our current coins might then be dug up, or
old walls and the foundations of buildings show themselves, as well as
the shells and stones of _the primeval world_, which are preserved down
to our times."[1096]

That many signs of the agency of man would have lasted at least as long
as "the shells of the primeval world," had our race been so ancient, we
may feel as fully persuaded as Berkeley; and we may anticipate with
confidence that many edifices and implements of human workmanship and
the skeletons of men, and casts of the human form, will continue to
exist when a great part of the present mountains, continents, and seas
have disappeared. Assuming the future duration of the planet to be
indefinitely protracted, we can foresee no limit to the perpetuation of
some of the memorials of man, which are continually entombed in the
bowels of the earth or in the bed of the ocean, unless we carry forward
our views to a period sufficient to allow the various causes of change,
both igneous and aqueous, to remodel more than once the entire crust of
the earth. _One_ compl