subserviency to our use, we find that "in every region the nature and disposition of the substrata lie at the foundation, not only of its agricultural productiveness, but also of its capability of supplying the materials which form the basis of its industry and arts." *

CHAPTER XII.

Theological Results contributed in the cultivation of Geology, and more especially by the examination of Fossil Organic Remains.

IT has been remarked, I believe by M. Baillie, that if the human mind can ever flatter itself with having been successful in discovering the truth, it is when many facts, and those facts of different kinds, unite in establishing the same result. It needs not any argument to prove, that the highest result by which the cultivation of comparative anatomy, and the extension of zoological and botanical investigations, aided by the application of kindred science, can be rewarded, is the collection and deduction, from the many facts of different kinds, and from the varied races in existing creation which it is the province of those studies to investigate, of arguments that concur in establishing the

* Presidential Address to Geol. Soc. 1840.

existence and operation, as shewn throughout the wide range of such inquiries, of one grand, comprehensive, and beneficent design. That such is the result of these investigations in the departments of animated nature with which mankind are immediately associated on the globe, no reasonable being can deny; and it would seem, therefore, that the mind engaged in such investigations, and successful in collecting and deducing such testimonies, and in finding them unite to establish the same result, might flatter itself with having been successful in discovering the truth.

But how greatly must this satisfaction be heightened, and how much must the conviction that the result thus arrived at is the truth, be corroborated and enforced, when the geologist announces that investigations conducted with a similar object in the more ancient and more wondrous department of the Creator's works, which it is the triumph of his own science to disclose, and the privilege of his own science to display, are there also attended with the same result! In the science of Geology, the fossil remains of the successive inhabitants of the ancient globe, the restored structures of plants and animals which successively occupied its surface in periods of remote and profound antiquity, and whose species and even genera are no longer continued in the ranks of existing nature, are equally rendered tributary to the establishment of that result, viz., to the demonstration of the eternal being,

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the wisdom, and the goodness of God. And in the venerable province of geological research, the operation of the same beneficent care and provision that are displayed throughout existing creation, is carried back to the earliest dawn of organic life upon the globe, to ages separated from us by, in all probability, many tens of thousands of years;-the beneficent and all-wise adaptations to specific purposes and actual conditions, which are exhibited throughout the existing races in animated nature, are by geological research equally illustrated in the monuments of the succession of dissimilar phenomena which the strata of the earth present, and in the fossil remains of structures which, for thousands of ages have ceased to exist, and in the monuments of events too remote for calculation. The eternal being of God, and the continued operation of His power are here established and displayed, throughout, as well as from the commencement of, the thousands of ages whose existence and whose flight are revealed and recorded in the fossil world; and the evidences of His wisdom and His goodness are here, through periods of incalculably lengthened duration, most clearly and satisfactorily displayed.

Since, therefore, the researches of Geology thus convincingly furnish, from their wondrous province, results of the same theological character as those which are deduced in the investigation of existing nature, and add to the testimonies derived from the latter source, the venerable sanction and corrobora

250 PECULIAR VALUE OF THOSE EVIDENCES,

tion of the distant ages which the researches of Geology have, as by enchantment, recalled and displayed, and since, also, the many facts of different kinds disclosed in geological investigation unite in establishing those results by "a chain of evidence amounting to demonstration," the mind engaged in the cultivation of such researches may reasonably flatter itself with having been successful in discovering the truth.

That such results are actually established in the pursuit of geological investigation, is well known to all persons engaged in their deduction; and will, I trust, have been made apparent to any noviciate reader by the arguments I have already enumerated on the subject. For we have seen that it may be with truth affirmed, that Geology has not merely opened in the fossil world new scenes of wonder and astonishment; that it has not merely acquainted us with the nature of the changes and revolutions which have visited our planet; nor merely exhibited its ancient surface inhabited by creatures of wondrous structure whose species have long ceased to exist, and by plants of which no living species are known; since Geology has traced, through monuments of most remote events, demonstrative and accumulated proofs of constantly presiding Intelligence and superintending Design; and, satisfactory as it was to find an identity of principle pervading all living kinds, Geology has added the yet more satisfactory demonstration that living and fossil kinds are all

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connected by one plan of organization, attesting the identity of the Design that has effected so many similar ends through such a variety of instruments, the principle of whose construction is in every instance fundamentally the same.

Nor in the phenomena connected with the developement of organic life upon the globe, are proofs of the operation and immediate interposition of Supreme Intelligence and Power less evidently afforded; for, "in the repeated and almost entire changes of organic types in the successive formations of the earth-in the absence of mammalia in the older, and their very rare appearance (and then in forms entirely unknown to us) in the newer secondary groups in the diffusion of warm-blooded quadrupeds (frequently of unknown genera) through the older tertiary systems-in their great abundance (and frequently of known genera) in the upper portions of the same series-and, lastly, in the recent appearance of man on the surface of the earth (now universally admitted)-in one word, from all these facts combined, we have a series of proofs the most emphatic and convincing,-that the existing order of nature is not the last of an uninterrupted succession of mere physical events derived from laws now in daily operation: but, on the contrary, that the approach to the present system of things has been gradual, and that there has been a progressive developement of organic structure subservient to the purposes of life. Considered as