phants' grinders, besides great tusks and numerous portions of skeletons. It was calculated that these remains could not have belonged to fewer than five hundred individual mammoths of English growth; and, various in their states of keeping, and belonging to animals of which only a few at a time could have found sufficient food in a limited tract of country, the inference seems inevitable that they must have belonged, not to one or two, but to many succeeding generations. The further fact, that remains of this ancient elephant (Elephas primigenius) occur all round the globe in a broad belt, extending from the fortieth to near the seventieth degree of north latitude, leads to the same conclusion. It must have required many ages ere an animal that breeds so slowly as the elephant could have extended itself over an area so vast.

Many of the contemporaries of this northern mammoth, especially of its molluscan contemporaries, continue, as I have said, to live in their descendants. Of even a still more ancient period, represented by the Red Crag, seventy out of every hundred species of shells still exist; and of an older period still, represented by the Coraline Crag, there survive sixty out of every hundred. In the Red Crag, for instance, we find the first known ancestors of our common edible periwinkle and common edible mussel; and in the Coraline, Crag, the first known ancestors of the common horsemussel, the common whelk, the common oyster, and the great pecten. There then occurs a break in the geologic deposits of Britain, which, however, in other parts of Europe we find so filled up as to render it evident that no corresponding break took place in the chain of existence; but that, on the contrary, from the present time up to the times represented by the earliest

Eocene formations of the Tertiary division, day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and that no chasm or hiatus-no age of general chaos, darkness, and death-has occurred, to break the line of succession, or check the course of life. All the evidence runs counter to the supposition that immediately before the appearance of man upon earth there existed a chaotic period which separated the previous from the present creation. Up till the commencement of the Eocene ages, if even then, there was no such chaotic period, in at least what is now Britain and the European continent; the persistency from a high antiquity of some of the existing races, of not only plants and shells, but of even some of the mammiferous animals, such as the badger, the goat, and the wild cat, prove there was not; and any scheme of reconciliation which takes such a period for granted must be deemed as unsuited to the present state of geologic knowledge as any scheme would have been forty years ago which took it for granted that the writings of Moses do "fix the antiquity of the globe."

The scheme of reconciliation adopted by the late Dr Pye Smith, though, save in one particular, identical, as I have said, with that of Dr Chalmers, is made, in virtue of its single point of difference, to steer clear of the difficulty. Both schemes exhibit the creation recorded in Genesis as an event which took place about six thousand years ago; both describe it as begun and completed in six natural days; and both represent it as cut off from a previously existing creation by a chaotic period of death and darkness. But while, according to the scheme of Chalmers, both the Biblical creation and the previous period of death are represented as co-extensive with the globe, they are re

presented, according to that of Dr Smith, as limited and local. They may have extended, it is said, over only a few provinces of Central Asia, in which, when all was life and light in other parts of the globe, there reigned for a time only death and darkness amid the welterings of a chaotic sea; which, at the Divine command, was penetrated by light, and occupied by dry land, and ultimately, ere the end of the creative week, became a centre in which certain plants and animals, and finally man himself, were created. And this scheme, by leaving to the geologist in this country and elsewhere, save mayhap in some unknown Asiatic district, his unbroken series, certainly does not conflict with the facts educed by geologic discovery. It virtually removes Scripture altogether out of the field. I must confess, however, that on this, and on some other accounts, it has failed to satisfy me. I have stumbled, too, at the conception of a merely local and limited chaos, in which the darkness would be so complete, that when first penetrated by the light, that penetration could be described as actually a making or creating of light, and that, while life obtained all around its precincts, could yet be thoroughly void of life. A local darkness so profound as to admit no ray of light seems to have fallen for a time on Egypt, as one of the ten plagues; but the event was evidently miraculous; and no student of natural science is entitled to have recourse, in order to extricate himself out of a difficulty, to supposititious, unrecorded miracle. Creation cannot take place without miracle; but it would be a strange reversal of all our previous conclusions on the subject, should we have to hold that the dead, dark blank out of which creation arose was miraculous also. And if, rejecting miracle, we cast ourselves on

the purely natural, we find that the local darknesses dependent on known causes, of which we have any re-. cord in history, were always either very imperfect, like the darkness of your London fogs, or very temporary, like the darkness described by Pliny as occasioned by a cloud of volcanic ashes; and so, altogether inadequate to meet the demands of a hypothesis such as that of Dr Smith. And yet further, I am disposed, I must add, to look for a broader and more general meaning in that grand description of the creation of all things with which the divine record so appropriately opens, than I could recognise it as forming were I assured it referred to but one of many existing creations, a creation restricted to mayhap a few hundred square miles of country, and to mayhap a few scores of animals and plants. What, then, is the scheme of reconciliation which I would venture to propound?

Let me first remark, in reply, that I come before you this evening, not as a philologist, but simply as a student of geological fact, who, believing his Bible, believes also that, though theologians have at various times striven hard to pledge it to false science, geographical, astronomical, and geological, it has been pledged by its Divine Author to no falsehood whatever. I occupy exactly the position now, with respect to geology, that the mere Christian geographer would have occupied with respect to geography in the days of those doctors of Salamanca who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Columbus that the world is round, -not flat; or exactly the position which the mere Christian astronomer would have occupied with respect to astronomy in the days of that Francis Turrettine who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Newton

and Galileo, that it is the earth which moves in the heavens, and the sun which stands still. The mere geographer or astronomer might have been wholly unable to discuss with Turrettine or the doctors the niceties of Chaldaic punctuation, or the various meanings of the Hebrew verbs. But this much, notwithstanding, he would be perfectly qualified to say:-However great your skill as linguists, your reading of what you term the scriptural geography or scriptural astronomy must of necessity be a false reading, seeing that it commits Scripture to what, in my character as a geographer or astronomer, I know to be a monstrously false geography or astronomy. Premising, then, that I make no pretensions to even the slightest skill in philology, I remark further, that it has been held by accomplished philologists, that the days of the Mosaic creation may be regarded, without doing violence to the genius of the Hebrew language, as successive periods of great extent. And certainly, in looking at my English Bible, I find that the portion of time spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis as six days, is spoken of in the second chapter as one day. True, there are other philologers, such as the late Professor Moses Stuart, who take a different view; but then I find this same Professor Stuart striving hard to make the phraseology of Moses "fix the antiquity of the globe;" and so, as a mere geologist, I reject his philology, on exactly the same principle on which the mere geographer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the philology of the doctors of Salamanca, or on which the mere astronomer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the philology of Turrettine and the old Francis

cans.

I would, in any such case, at once, and without hesitation, cut the philological knot, by determining