common cradle or quarter of the world; and that that quarter was an eastern region, as we might, a priori, have supposed, from Asia having been the first land peopled after the Flood.

"But besides this singular coincidence in language, over the whole inhabited earth, there is, also, a most remarkable confirmation of the same unity of origin, in the correspondence between all nations whatever, where any traces of the art of arithmetic exist, in the employment of a DECIMAL gradation.

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Whence comes it to pass, that blacks and whites, in every quarter, the savage and the civilized, wherever a human community has been found, have neither stopped short of, nor exceeded a series of ten in their calculations; and that as soon as they have reached this number, they have, uniformly, begun a second series with the first unit in the scale, as one ten, two ten, &c.? Why have not some nations broke off at five, or others proceeded to fifteen, before they began a second series? Or why have the generality of them had any thing more than one single and infinitesimal series, and, consequently, a new name for every unit? Such an universality cannot possibly have existed, except from a like universality of cause; and we have, in this single instance alone, a proof equal to mathematical demonstration, that

the different languages into which it enters, and of which it forms so prominent a feature, must, assuredly, have originated not from accident, at different times, and in different places, but from direct determination and design, at the same time, and in the same place; that it must be the result of one grand, comprehensive, and original system. Such system could not have been of human invention: what then remains for us, but to confess that it must have been of Divine and Supernatural communication?

"Such examples, though few, are abundantly sufficient to establish the point; and they even lead us to a second and catenating fact, namely, that the primary and original language of man, that language divinely and supernaturally communicated to him, in the early ages of the world, has been broken up, confounded, and scattered, in various fragments, over every part of the habitable globe; that the same sort of disruption that has confounded former continents and oceans, and intermingled the productions natural to different hemispheres and latitudes, this same Power has assaulted the world's primeval tongue, has overwhelmed a great part of it, wrecked the remainder on distant and opposite shores, and turned up new materials out of the general convulsion and if it were possible for us to

meet with an ancient historical record, which professed to contain a plain and simple statement of such supernatural communication, and such subsequent confusion of tongues, it would be a book, which, independently of any other information, would be amply entitled to our attention, for it would thus bear an index of commanding authority on its own forehead. "Such a book is now in our hands. prize it, for it must be the WORD OF GOD, as it bears the direct stamp and testimony of His works."*

* The Book of Nature, by Dr. Mason Good.

Let us

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CONCLUSIONS

To which we are naturally led by the general tenor of the foregoing enquiry.

HAVING Completed the proposed general survey of the system of geological phenomena, on every part of the earth's surface, let us now take a retrospective view of the various conclusions to which we have been led, in regarding the Creation, and the laws to which all created beings have been submitted by the Almighty. And, first, we have found it unreasonable, and unphilosophical, to subscribe to the doctrines, too commonly taught, wherein the first production of all things is supposed to have arisen by the mere laws of nature, or from secondary causes, within a chaotic or imperfect mass; because, in adopting this opinion, we find ourselves as far removed as ever from the ORIGIN of things of which we were in search: for even were we to admit, with the Wernerian school of philosophy, the primary existence of

an aqueous chaos, and that the laws of nature have, in an indefinitely long period of time, gradually produced the beautiful order and arrangement we now admire in the universe; we should still have to account for the сотроnent parts of that chaotic mass, which could not have come into being by any of the known laws of nature and being thus driven to acknowledge a Creative Power, capable of producing even a chaos out of nothing, and of establishing those wonderful laws which now govern the world, we should find ourselves, without any available object, derogating from the Wisdom and Power of a Creator, by denying a PERFECT creation of all things in the beginning. If we are forced to this conclusion, with regard to the actual structure of the mineral body of the earth, we are even more forcibly convinced of this great truth, by a survey of the animal and vegetable world with which it is furnished. For when we consider the evident design, which is so remarkably displayed in the structure of these bodies, we must feel satisfied, that though the laws of nature may, and do, now regulate them, they never could have, at first, produced them. We have found, that as it is unreasonable to suppose the first man to have ever been an infant, or the first oak tree to have sprung from an acorn, we are forced to the adoption of