some allow their imaginations to stretch into a credulity so extravagant, that we need not wonder at the tales and chimeras which more vulgar minds believe and propagate.

If it were not in print before our eyes, could we suppose that in this skeptical age, men of science, men of knowledge and reasoning, and who desire to be respected also for their judgment, should seriously teach and write that our earth has been existing, not as Moses indicates, 6000 years only, but 300,000?* Not content with this lavish conjecture, one geologist of real talent proceeds to divide it into four periods, and to assign to each of these an actual precision of duration, as if he were transcribing some ancient record, which had transmitted the chronology of the several periods to us. He admits that man has not been on the globe above 6000, or 7000 years.§ The rest of his computed time he allots to the animals, vegetables, and unorganized matter, which preceded him; as if it could be probable to any rational mind that the Creator would have taken 60,000 years merely to form the primordial rocks-have then let the earth remain with vegetables, the sea and marine animals only, for 200,000 years, and then have added quadrupeds and the rest of the brute creation for 30,000 more, before he made his human beings upon it, the only intelligent creatures for

"Although the world is not eternal, it is nevertheless very ancient; and in calculating all the time that was required for the formation of the numerous beds which the globe presents to us, for the life and reproduction of all the animals and vegetables whose remains it contains, according to the time employed for the actual formation whose duration we know, we are forced to admit that the world is at least 300,000 years old."-Boubée's Geol. Populaire, p. 7. Paris, 1833.

† His Four Epoques are,

1. The primitive state of the "incandescence du globe," when the atmosphere was all on fire, from which it gradually cooled.-P. 27-29.

2. The first appearance of organized beings, plants, and aquatic animals, and the formation of the coal beds, and the extinction and successive crea tion of those organized beings.-P. 31-36.

3. The appearance of land animals; increasing progression of the organic kingdom, and decrease of the inorganic.-P. 39-41.

4. The universal deluge; after which he places the first appearance of human beings.-P. 42-63.

M. Boubée accompanies his book with a tablean of the different ages. In this he specifies, that the 1st epoch lasted 60,000 years; the 2d, 200,000; the 3d, 30.000; and the 4th, 8000 years.

"It is very true that man has only 6 or 7000 years of antiquity on the globe. Modern historical researches are now agreed on this point. The traditions which seemed to give him a much greater antiquity were founded only on imperfect observations."-Ib. p. 5.

whom the earthly system seems to have been devised and framed at all. I do not press this theory peculiarly against this gentleman, because he has done no more than imitate many scientific predecessors, who have indulged in such dreams; I merely adduce him as one of the latest of those able men who have done so, to show with what inveteracy ideas of this sort cling to the human mind, when they have once gained an admission into it. Their long retention shows that no talents and no science will lead us to a perception of the true chronology of our globe; and that we must either receive it from the sacred authority which has declared it to us, or abandon our minds to all the wild and baseless theories which individual excitement may invent and propagate, without any one having greater probability or a better foundation than another. Without its superior guide, human speculations will on this point only lead us into a chaos of undigested dreams and conflicting hypotheses; for whenever fact is deserted, or cannot be had for the deciding appeal, no one thinks another's conjectures to be preferable to his own. *

How illusory all such suppositions are, and therefore how unworthy of the attention of rational men, is strongly shown by the circumstance which Cuvier notices. One author inferred

* But although Mr. Boubée's calculations are sufficiently startling, they have been outdone in our own island. Mr. McCulloch, in 1831, thinks it reasonable to say, "We shall not exceed, far from it, did we allow 200,000 years for the production of the coal series of Newcastle, with all its rocky strata. A Scottish lake does not shoal at the rate of half a foot in a century; and that country presents a vertical depth of far more than 3000 feet in the single series of the oldest sandstone. No sound geologist will accuse a computer of exceeding, if he allows 600,000 years for the production of this series alone."

I can only say on this, that sound geologists and sound reasoners must be very different beings, according to my apprehension of what is reasonable. But I am not quite certain that the author is serious in what he writes; for he proceeds to enlarge till he seems to smile at his own exaggerations, for he adds,

Yet what are the coal deposites; and what the oldest sandstone, compared to the entire mass of the strata? Let the computer measure the Appenine and the Jura. Let him, if he can trust Pallas, measure the successive strata of 60 miles in depth, which he believes himself to have ascertained; and then he may renew his computations: while, when he has summed the whole, his labour is not terminated. But let the reader supply the figures, which it is useless to exhibit, SINCE THEY CANNOT BE TRUE."-McCulloch, Geology, v. i. p. 507. These last five words express the true character of all this sort of calculation.

from the appearances in the mines of Elba, that they had been worked 40,000 years ago. Another, after examining the same thing, reduces this time to 5000 years. Thus the eyes and judgment of one saw, in the same natural circumstances, only what 5000 years could have accomplished, while those of the other inferred that 40,000 years were requisite to produce them.* All the speculative conclusions of the extravagant duration of the earth, from the consideration of the nature and remains of its rocky beds and their organic fossils, are precisely of this character. The assumed period is made large or small, according to the fancy of the individual who theorizes upon them; and yet what stronger demonstration can we have that such conjectures have no real foundation at all, when very different periods are thought to be equally inferrible from the same phenomena ? Such contrary deductions by men of abilities and science from the same natural facts, seem to me to be satisfactory evidence that these phenomena, though they truly mark the succession, give no evidence at all of the chronology of the deposites and formations.†

The differences of opinion of able men on the subject of the deluge, when they contemplate the same phenomena of nature, are a convincing testimony to a cautious judgment that if we abandon our sacred authorities as to the certainty of this event, we shall only surrender ourselves to the fluctuating decisions of individual inferences and imaginations, or to those of our own mind, as new deductions are made from new appearances that occur, or as new names arise to impress us, or as new arguments for the time being are suggested. We are really in this state now

* "A recent writer pretends that the mines of the Island of the Elba, to judge from their wastes, must have been explored above 40,000 years ago: while another author, who has also examined these wastes with much attention, reduces the interval to somewhat more than 5000 years; supposing that the ancients wrought out every year one fourth only of the quantity that is wrought out in the present day."-Cuvier's Essay on the Theory of the Earth, p. 170.-Jameson's Transl.

† Buffon was one of those who began the extravagant chronology of the earth, by his gratuitous fancy that the earth had been a fiery comet or red hot splinter of the sun, which he calculated would take 20 or 30,000 years to cool. This unfounded imagination was soon adopted, and reasoned upon as a fact; and it soon became fashionable to discountenance the Mosaic chronology, in order that these groundless dreams might be substituted instead.

if we put aside the Mosaic record. We are exactly, as to the creation and the deluge, independent of their pilotage, as Cicero was on the Deity himself, when he wrote his "Natura Deorum." He saw a number of conflicting opinions on both sides of the question. He perceived that each was supported by men of great names and talents. He had no sacred guide, before him, to which, in such a wilderness of fancies, conjectures, appearances, and arguments, he could resort for the discernment and certitude of what was true on this great topic. He felt his own mind affected by all these different reasonings and authorities, and therefore he thought it wise to have no certain opinion about the matter; and so concluded his elaborate investigations.

If he were now alive, and he or any man of equal capacity and impartiality were to write on the creation or the deluge, solely from what he read in geologists and saw in the rocks and fossils, without knowing or believing what the sacred records deliver to us concerning them, he would compose only such another work of opposing notions, opposing facts, opposing reasoning upon them, and opposing inferences from them. He would find men of equal talent and knowledge at variance with each other, and depreciating each other for being of a contrary opinion to themselves. He would state that geologists of such eminence as Dr. Buckland, Mr. W. Conybeare, Mr. McCulloch, Mr. Fairholme, and many other men of equal ability and science in the country, have declared their belief in a universal deluge, and that abroad, M. Cuvier, M. d'Omalius, M. de Beaumont, and several others, have as publicly announced a similar opinion. But the world presents a catalogue of names as respected, who from looking at nature with a disbelief of the Mosaic history, have made and support a contrary deduction; and thus if he sought to settle his judgment on human authorities, or on natural phenomena only, it would be but to end in Cicero's conclusion, that the subject was difficult and obscure, but that one of the opinions might be rather more probable than the other.

The mistaken reasonings on this important point which some observers of nature have raised from the facts of their own personal knowledge, and their own mistaken perceptions of these facts, have been very numerous within the last hun. dred years. Brydone is a striking instance of this. In my

youth he was used as a leading authority for overturning the Mosaic history, because his observation and inference as to Mount Etna led, and were meant to lead to the impression that the state of the lava there proved the Sicilian district of the earth to have been about 14,000 years in existence.* It is now universally admitted and has been shown that his sensorial perception of the fact he noticed was a fallacy; as well as his deduction from it.t

But is it true, as a physical fact, that lava takes two thousand years to be decomposed by natural agencies into earth? In the same parts of the world, scientific men have found that seven hundred years, and even five hundred years have been sufficient to cause this effect. So deceptive are the calculations and reasonings of geologists on which they base their gigantic chronologies.‡

One of the chief causes of the suggestion of these vast chronologies, is the supposed length of time which the rocks, as they are superimposed on each other, must have taken to harden and become consolidated before the new ones were deposited upon them, or could have been sustained, and the

Brydone, in his tour to Sicily, alleged the authority of the Canon Recupero for believing, that for a bed of lava to have a coating of soil from the decomposition of its surface, 2000 years were required to elapse; and having observed that in the neighbourhood of Etna there were seven lava beds lying over one another, with strata of rich earth between them, the deduction was made that this mountain must have been, from these circumstances, at least 14,000 years old.

† Dr. Daubeny, in his Geology of Sicily, thus describes the beds of lava in this pit at Aci Reale :-"At all events, Brydone has been grossly deceived in imagining that the seven beds of lava, seen lying one above another near the spot, have been sufficiently decomposed into vegetable mould. The substance which really intervenes between the beds, being nothing more than a sort of ferruginous tuff, just similar to what would be produced by a shower of volcanic ashes, such as usually precedes or follows an eruption of lava, mixed up with mud, or consolidated by rain. Of course his inference with respect to the antiquity of the globe falls to the ground, as being founded on the fact of the decomposition of so many beds of lava, which turns out to be altogether a mistake."-Ed. Phil. Journ. v. xiii. p. 266. Dr. Ure, Geol. xlvii. Introd.

M. D'Aubuisson remarks of Etna, that the lava of the year 1157 is now covered with twelve inches of vegetable earth proceeding from its own decomposition; and that the lava of 1329 is covered with eight inches.-D'Aubuisson, Geognosie, t. 2, p. 592, 3. Dr. Ure, xlvi. On comparing these two dates we find that 172 years were sufficient for the decomposition of four inches of lava at Etna; while from local or other causes peculiar to Auvergne, several of the lavas there have, in some part, not changed at all.-D'Aub. ib. Nothing therefore as to chronology can be justly inferred from such things.