against those geologists who represent the course of
nature at the earliest periods as resembling in all essential
circumstances the state of things now established. We have seen that, in
opposition to this doctrine, a strong desire has been manifested to
discover in the ancient rocks the signs of an epoch when the planet was
uninhabited, and when its surface was in a chaotic condition and
uninhabitable. The opposite opinion, indeed, that the oldest of the
rocks now visible may be the last monuments of an antecedent era in
which living beings may already have peopled the land and water, has
been declared to be equivalent to the assumption that there never was a
beginning to the present order of things.

With equal justice might an astronomer be accused of asserting that the
works of creation extended throughout _infinite_ space, because he
refuses to take for granted that the remotest stars now seen in the
heavens are on the utmost verge of the material universe. Every
improvement of the telescope has brought thousands of new worlds into
view; and it would, therefore, be rash and unphilosophical to imagine
that we already survey the whole extent of the vast scheme, or that it
will ever be brought within the sphere of human observation.

But no argument can be drawn from such premises in favor of the infinity
of the space that has been filled with worlds; and if the material
universe has any limits, it then follows, that it must occupy a minute
and infinitesimal point in infinite space.

So if, in tracing back the earth's history, we arrive at the monuments
of events which may have happened millions of ages before our times, and
if we still find no decided evidence of a commencement, yet the
arguments from analogy in support of the probability of a beginning
remain unshaken; and if the past duration of the earth be finite, then
the aggregate of geological epochs, however numerous, must constitute a
mere moment of the past, a mere infinitesimal portion of eternity.

It has been argued, that, as the different states of the earth's
surface, and the different species by which it has been inhabited have
all had their origin, and many of them their termination, so the entire
series may have commenced at a certain period. It has also been urged,
that, as we admit the creation of man to have occurred at a
comparatively modern epoch--as we concede the astonishing fact of the
first introduction of a moral and intellectual bein