is work remained; and so, in the book of
organization, we must combine what is left with what we can recover from
past ages and buried strata before we can rise to a comprehension of the
grand argument, and intelligibly grasp the whole work.

[Sidenote: Enormous age of the earth.] Of that book it is immaterial to
what page we turn. It tells us of effects of such magnitude as imply
prodigiously long periods of time for their accomplishment. Its moments
look to us as if they were eternities. What shall we say when we read in
it that there are fossiliferous rocks which have been slowly raised ten
thousand feet above the level of the sea so lately as since the
commencement of the Tertiary times; that the Purbeck beds of the upper
oolite are in themselves the memorials of an enormous lapse of time;
that, since a forest in a thousand years can scarce produce more than
two or three feet of vegetable soil, each dirt-bed is the work of
hundreds of centuries. What shall we say when it tells us that the delta
of the Mississippi could only be formed in many tens of thousands of
years, and yet that is only as yesterday when compared with the date of
the inland terraces; that the recession of the Falls of Niagara from
Queenstown to the present site consumed thirty thousand years; that if
the depression of the carboniferous strata of Nova Scotia took place at
the rate of four feet in a century, there were demanded 375,000 years
for its completion--such a movement in the upward direction would have
raised Mont Blanc; that it would take as great a river as the
Mississippi two millions of years to convey into the Gulf of Mexico as
much sediment as is found in those strata. Such statements may appear to
us, who with difficulty shake off the absurdities of the patristic
chronology, wild and impossible to be maintained, and yet they are the
conclusions that the most learned and profound geologists draw from
their reading of the Book of Nature.

[Sidenote: Summary as respects the world in time.] Thus, as respects the
age of the earth and her relations in time, we approach the doctrine of
Orientals, who long ago ascertained that the scales of time and of space
correspond to each other. More fortunate than we, they had but one point
of resistance to encounter, but that resistance they met with
dissimulation, and not in an open way. They attempted to conceal the
tendency of their doctrine by allying or affiliating it with detected
errors. Acco