made their period, though only a moment in the ages of animal life, the only period of intelligence, morality, religion. If, then, to suppose that He has done this is contrary to our conceptions of His greatness and majesty, it is plain that our conceptions are erroneous: they have taken a wrong direction. God has not judged as to what is worthy of Him as we have judged. He has found it worthy of Him to bestow upon man his special care, though he occupies so small a portion of time; and why not, then, although he occupies so small a portion of space?

"Or is the objection this,—that if we suppose the earth only to be occupied by inhabitants, all the other globes of the universe are wasted, -turned to no purpose? Is waste of this kind considered as unsuited to the character of the Creator? But here again we have the like waste in the occupation of the earth. All its previous ages, its seas, and its continents, have been wasted upon mere brute life,-often, so far as we can see, for myriads of years upon the lowest, the least conscious form of life,-upon shell-fishes, crabs, sponges. Why, then, should not the seas and continents of other planets be occupied at present with a life no higher than this, or with no life at all?"- September 20, 1854.

THE SPACES AND THE PERIODS.

THAT vast development of natural science which forms a leading characteristic of the present age gives an importance to questions such as that which it involves, which they did not possess at any former period; and must, we doubt not, materially affect in the future the entire front of that ever fresh controversy which has been maintained since the earliest ages of the Church around the Christian evidences. Let us address ourselves to the present portion of our subject,-the great extent of the geologic periods,-through the medium. of a simple illustration.

Let us suppose that shortly after the arrival of the Mayflower at the shores of New England, and just as the Pilgrim Fathers are preparing to begin their labours among the deep

primeval forests which cover the country, there occurs a friendly controversy between two of the party regarding the age of these vast woods. All the trees are of kinds unknown at home; and, though loftier, many of them, than the great oaks of England, and not a few of them not less bulky, it is maintained by one of the disputants that they may yet have come under very different laws of growth, and may not be one twentieth part so old. These hoary forests, he argues, though it would require some three or four centuries to form such on the eastern shores of the Atlantic, may on its western shores be less than fifty years old; nay, not only may the woods of the country be as of yesterday compared with those of England, but even its animals may be of such rapid growth, that the mouse-deer, though of ponderous bulk and size, may be in reality only a few months old; and the oyster, which on the English beds takes from five to seven years, as shown by its annual shoots, to be fit for market, may in the American greatly larger species be equally mature in as many weeks. The disputant contends—and at this stage of the controversy contends truly that they are furnished with no correct unit by which to measure the age of either the unknown plants or unfamiliar animals of the new country. Let us yet farther suppose that in the immediate neighbourhood of the infant settlement there is a small lake, which the settlers find it necessary for sanitary purposes to drain, and that they cut through, in the work, one of those deep mosses of Northern America in which the gigantic bones, and not unfrequently the entire skeletons, of the mastodon occur. Let us suppose

that they first cut through several yards of solid peat,—that they then reach a tier of rather small tree-stumps sticking in the soil, that a second tier of somewhat larger tree-stumps lies beneath, that they then reach a third tier of still larger that under the stratum of earth which underlies these they find a thick bed of marl composed chiefly of very

stumps,

minute shells, and that embedded in the marl they find the skeleton of a mastodon. Judging from data furnished on the eastern side of the Atlantic, the pilgrim, who has been asserting, in opposition to his neighbour, the antiquity of the American woods, argues from these appearances that the moss deposit must be of great age, and the underlying skeleton of an age greater still. Mosses in Old England, containing three tiers of stumps, are demonstrably as old as the times of the Roman invasion. Even the Roman axe has in some instances been found sticking in the lower trunks; and at least the huge unknown skeleton just found in the moss must, he urges, be quite as ancient as the times of Agricola or Julius Cæsar. His antagonist, however, challenges the inference. The previous question has, he asserts, first to be settled. The rate of growth of the American wood and the American shells has to be determined ere any calculation can be founded on either the three tiers of stumps or the overlying or intervening deposits of vegetable matter, or yet on the thickness of the shell-marl which underlies the whole. For if, as he contends, the growth of animals and vegetables be, as is possible, very rapid in the new world, the moss and shells, instead of being at least sixteen or seventeen hundred years old, may not be above sixty or seventy years old, and the huge animal beneath may have been living only eighty or a hundred years ago. At length, however, the required. unit of measurement turns up. In cutting a tree for the erection of his hut, the pilgrim who maintains the opposite side of the argument finds it strongly marked by the annual rings. And there can be no doubt that the rings are annual Between the tropics, when rings occur at all, they may indicate the checks given to vegetation by the dry seasons; and as the year has in certain localities two of these, each twelvemonth may be represented in the tree, not by one, but by two rings. But in the latitude of New England,

ones.

where winter presses his iron signet on the soil with much firmness, one strongly-marked ring represents the year; and so, if it be found that a tree of some eighteen or twenty inches in diameter has its hundred concentric rings, it may be safely predicated that it has stood its century. And such, in the supposed case, is the inference of the pilgrim. He has at length got a unit, in reality fixed by the great, nevervarying astronomic movements which give to the world its seed-time and its winter; and finding, as he cuts tree after tree, the same evidence repeated,―ring answering to ring, here larger and there smaller, but in their average proportions corresponding with those of the English woods, he is constrained definitively to conclude that the trees of the new country grow as slowly, or nearly so, as those of the old one; and he confidently challenges his antagonist to test the data on which he founds. Nor can he hold that his newly-found unit, though, strictly speaking, only a measure of the age of the various forest trees in which it occurs, has bearing only on them. If trees grow as slowly in the new country as in the old, can he rationally hold that its other classes of vegetables,—its ferns, equisetacæ, club-mosses, grasses, and herbaceous plants generally, grow much faster than their cogeners at home? Farther, though his unit does not enable him to measure exactly the age by the mossy deposit, with its three tiers of stumps and its underlying mastodon, it at least enables him to determine that it must be very old. It gives him in succession the age of each tier; and when he infers respecting the intervening and overlying deposits of vegetable matter, that, as the trees grow slowly, the deposits must have been formed correspondingly slow in about the average ratio of similar formations on the other side of the Atlantic, it justifies the inference: nay, it is not without its bearing on the probable growth of the animals of the country also. It would be utterly wild to hold that, in a country in which an

ordinary-sized pine was the slow growth of a century, a mouse-deer or a grizzly bear shot up to its full size in a few weeks or months. And if in the foliaceous shells of the coast, such as its oysters, he finds exactly such layers of growth, or shoots, as those from which the oyster-fisher at home computes the age of the animals, each "shoot" being the work of a year, can he avoid the conclusion that here also he has got a unit by which to measure the time during which the organisms have lived, and from which he may conclude, in all sobriety, that if the bed of shell-marl which contains the remains of the mastodon be very thick, it must of necessity be very old? If he cannot, in strictness, apply his units to every plant or every shell, or yet to every deposit of vegetable or animal origin, they at least tell him that the same general laws of growth obtain on the one side of the Atlantic as on the other, and warn him against inferring, like his antagonist, that the cases in which he has not yet been able to apply them are in any degree anomalous, or under laws that are different.

We have but to apply to the geological periods of at least the Secondary and Tertiary divisions, the reasoning of our illustration here, in order to determine that they must have been immensely prolonged. In no degree is the argument more affected by the portion of time which separates our age from the ages of the Oolite, than by the portion of space which separates our country from the eastern shores of America. In the woods of the great paleozoic division the lines of growth are uncertain and capricious. Many of the trees furnish no trace of them whatever, just as there are recent intertropical trees in which they do not occur; and in some of the others they appear capriciously and irregularly, as in those intertropical trees in which the growth is checked from time to time by intense heats and occasional droughts. But in the woods of the Lias and Oolite winter has set his seal