evidence of the declaration of the intention of God to destroy the earth, and of the physical facts with which we are now surrounded on every part of the present dry land.

Now, it would be pure pedantry to pretend to say that every foot of land, that was dry before the deluge, was dry after the deluge; but we will say that if the Mosaic narrative do not assert generally that that which was dry land before the deluge became dry land after the deluge, and so contradict the supposition that the land laid bare by the subsidence of the flood was not the land that had been bare up to the commencement of the flood, but the land that had, till then, been covered with the waters of the ocean-it would just as little contradict the supposition that the land submerged was indeed the land of this planet, but that the land that emerged from the aqueous envelope was the land of the moon or the remotest planet of our system. As to the expression in one of the Epistles of Peter, distinguishing between the earth that then was" and " the earth that now is," we protest, on behalf of ourselves, and confidently on behalf of all that portion of mankind endowed with common that any man may distinguish between the "ante-diluvian world" and "the post-diluvian world," without being understood to support the Penn-Fairholme hypothesis. So also as to the "declared intention" of the Almighty to "destroy the earth." The earth was destroyed, in every natural sense of the term, when the waters of the deluge were brought over it, without reference to the question of the emergence.

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sense,

And now, at length, we come to direct our special attention to the work of our Indian Geologist, to whom we feel that we owe an apology for having seemed to neglect it so long. But in reality we have scarcely lost sight of Captain Hutton and his work throughout; on the contrary, we have all along been laying down principles that will be helpful to us in judging of the Chronology of the creation." We believe we shall best be able to bring just so much of the subject before our readers, as we design to bring before them, (for even those who are disposed to complain of our tediousness hitherto, will admit that we have kept as clear as possible of extraneous matter, and have confined ourselves as strictly as possible to the question of the harmony of scripture with geological ascertainments as to the actual duration of the earth), by noticing our author's view of what happened before the commencement of the creation-the creation-the events between the creation and the deluge the deluge-and the events subsequent to the deluge. We shall thus indeed pass unnoticed much interesting matter, and much that might well call for remark, in the work

before us; but we shall thus also keep our article within moderate bounds.

With respect to the period that elapsed before the CREATION, our author is of opinion, that, at a certain period in the earth's history, the materials of which it is composed consisted of water, holding all the others in solution. He does not enquire whether this were the state, in which the materials of the earth were originally created, or whether this were the state into which they were reduced at a period subsequent to their original creation; but he takes up the investigation at the point when the earth consisted of a fluid mass (we should rather say viscous) revolving round an axis, and holding in solution all the solid matter which is contained in our present globe. In connection with this part of his subject, he gives (what we regard as) a satisfactory refutation of the nebular hypothesis. Altogether, we believe that this part of his work is strictly accurate, as descriptive of the state in which the earth was at one period, after the materials thereof had been called into being, and previous to the arrangement of these materials in the six days of the Mosaic record; but whether the earth continued in this state up to the time when the work of these six days began, or whether various organizations and dis-organizations had taken place before the period when the Mosaic detail commences, we leave for future consideration.

The second chapter of the work before us is one of the least satisfactory in the whole book, filled with reasoning which, we must confess, wears, to our thinking, much more the aspect of a desire to gain a victory over an opponent, than to ascertain the precise truth. The object of it is to prove, in opposition to the views of Chalmers, Buckland, Sedgwick, and so many others, that the earth was never in a habitable state, and was never inhabited, at any period between the beginning and the evening of the first day. The reasoning employed is to this effect. The animals, which are supposed to have inhabited the earth during this period, had eyes, and therefore they existed, not before, but after, the creation of light. But light was not created, or at least did not reach the earth, until the evening of the first day. But then, in answer to this, it may be said that while the scripture declares that there was darkness upon the face of the deep at the period immediately preceding the first day, it is nowhere stated that this darkness had existed throughout the whole period from the beginning; and that it is both possible and highly probable that the darkness was only temporary, having been caused by the surcharging of the atmos phere with thick and impenetrable vapours. To this Captain

Hutton replies, in effect, as follows:-There could be no light available for the ordinary purposes of vision without an atmosphere. But if there were an atmosphere, the light could never be so obscured as to constitute that darkness which, according to all allowance, was upon the face of the deep at the period when the divine word was uttered- Let there be light.' If (says he) the atmosphere existed, as according to this author it did, previous to the first day, so likewise must the sun have existed, and therefore, however complete may have been the screen of clouds, mists, or vapours, which excluded that body itself from view, it would have been utterly impossible, as it is now, to prevent the effect of day-light, however dimmed; and consequently, no darkness, such as that to which the scripture alludes, could have enveloped the chaotic earth." We do not like to state in so many words how this reasoning strikes us. It is a principle in optics, that light, in passing through any medium not absolutely opaque, loses a certain proportion of its intensity, the amount differing according to the degree of transparency of the medium. Now, as no medium that we know is absolutely transparent, so it is probable that none is absolutely opaque; so that it is quite possible that, as no medium transmits the whole of the light that falls upon it, so no one perhaps may intercept the whole. It is upon this supposition that our author's argument is founded. But suppose we admit that some light passes through a whin-stone, if we had only eyes capable of perceiving it ; and suppose we admit that no clouds or vapours, with which we are acquainted, do actually produce total darkness at noon-day; what authority has our author for asserting that the darkness which brooded on the face of the deep was absolute and entire darkness? This word-darkness, or its corresponding word in whatsoever language, is, of necessity, a relative term, seldom, or perhaps never, for aught we know, signifying absolutely a total absence of light, but generally a greater or less deprivation of light. Thus we speak of a "very dark day," while yet there is as much light, as when we speak of a "fine light night." And in this relative sense, the word is perpetually used in scripture, as any one may see who will take a Concordance, and refer to all the passages in which the term occurs. Now, short of absolute darkness, it is unquestionable that any amount whatever of lack of light might be caused by temporarily acting causes, without having recourse to the supposition of an actual darkening of the sun; a supposition, however, by the way, which is no ways unallowable. They who have witnessed, for it would scarcely be legitimate to say seen, a proper London fog, must have formed a tolerably large estimate of the powers

of our atmosphere to sustain obscurative matters; and we have only to suppose an encrease of the quantity of these, in order to furnish out an amount of obscuration sufficient to satisfy any reasonable demand.

We are afraid it may be thought that we have dwelt too long upon this argument; but we cannot leave this chapter without alluding to the account which our author gives of his notion as to the way in which light first reached our earth. We must give the passage at length :

It is fully in accordance with the statements of holy writ, to believe that the heavenly bodies may have existed through ages, previous to the first day of Genesis, although they did not give light to our planet before that day. The text, it must be observed, insists upon nothing more than that light had not yet visited the earth; but it does not declare that the bodies from which that light was eventually to proceed, were not already in existence. The application, therefore, of evidence derived from astronomy, proves indubitably the great antiquity of those material elements from which this system was at length elaborated; and it will be perfectly consonant to reason, and in accordance with scripture, to believe that the creation of the material elements of the earth was contemporaneous with the creation of the elements of the heavenly bodies, and that all were left, under the guidance of certain natural laws, to progress towards that state which would eventually fit them to form our solar system, and for which they were evidently not prepared before the first day. Our planet, therefore, and the heavenly bodies, existed together through the undefined beginning, although not precisely in their present relation to each other, until such time as each had become prepared to assume its proper functions in the system, when, having been perfected, their light would then first have reached, or been intercepted by, the aqueous spheroid. That period, as the Bible and reason lead us to believe, was the particular point of time spoken of on the first day, when light was, as regarded on earth, to all intents and purposes, created. But while the light of Sirius is said to be six years and four months in reaching the earth, and while the light of the brilliant nebulæ is one million and nine hundred thousand years in reaching it, that of the Sun arrives in only eight minutes. If, therefore, no light reached the earth before the first day, when the effects of the sun became apparent, it must necessarily follow that all light had arrived at the same state of perfection on the first day, and consequently that the light and the heavenly bodies being simultaneously apparent on that day, must prove that if the elementary materials of the heaven and the earth were created at the same time, as the Bible and astronomy teach us to believe, the duration of the period styled "the beginning” must have been at least long enough to admit of the light of the nebulæ reaching the earth on the first day,-which will give to the strata, from the centre of the planet up to the highest of the primary rocks inclusive, an age of no less than 1,900,000 years before the first day began; and as throughout that period no organized beings could have inhabited it, there was evidently a time, as the Scripture and Geology disclose, when neither vegetable nor animal life had existence on the globe.

We have looked at this passage from every possible point of view, in the hope of being able to find that it is capable of some other interpretation than that which first occurred to us.

But it will not do. Despite of the occurrence of one or two expressions that seem inconsistent with the main drift of the passage, we are obliged to conclude the meaning of the whole to be this. The whole of the material elements of the heaven and earth were made at once, but all the bodies that are now luminous were then dark. However, they were made subject to certain laws, in virtue of whose operation they became lumi-, nous at certain periods; and these periods were so arranged, that the first ray of light that issued from each one of them, reached the earth at the same instant of time on the evening of the first day. But as we know that light occupies eight minutes in traversing the distance between the earth and the sun, and all possible lengths of time betwixt 63 years as a minimum, and 1,900,000 years as a maximum, in traversing the distance. between the earth and the several fixed stars, it follows that the period when luminosity was imparted to the sun was 8 minutes, and that when it was imparted to Sirius 62 years, and to the most distant nebulæ 1,900,000 years, before the commencement of the first day; and that in general we shall find the precise point of time, when any body became luminous, by dividing the number of miles representing its distance from the earth, by the number representing the distance that light traverses in a year, and counting the result backwards from the evening of the first day. However, even on the supposition that the most distant individual of the starry family emitted his first ray at the instant of the common tion, there still must have been the above-mentioned period of 1,900,000 years elapsing between the creation of all the material elements of the universe and the commencement of the first day. Such being our author's view of the origin of light, we must just leave our readers to believe it,—if they can. ourselves, we find it difficult to believe that the command-"Let there be light" meant absolutely nothing at all, since the light arrived, independently of the command, from so many millions of luminaries, each lighted at the precise instant which was necessary to enable its light to reach the earth at the precise instant when the useless command is represented to have been given. So much then for the period styled the beginning, or the period that elapsed before the commencement of the six days.

crea

For

The creation itself, as we may call the work of the six days, is described by our author at considerable length. First of all, at a time shortly preceding the issue of the mandate for the arrival of light, the sun, which had from the beginning been endued with attractive energy, was gifted with the power of emitting.