ary. Indeed, at most localities, however large may be the pebbles imbedded in some of the layers, the intervening matter will be found to possess the character of a soft felspathic sandstone, and some portions of the mass will display this character throughout.

"The pebbles thus imbedded in the finer material of these beds, sometimes in layers of many feet in thickness, but oftener in narrow courses, are frequently of great size, measuring even as much as eight or ten inches in diameter. They are of very various origin; some being from the primary region, and consisting of quartz, gneiss, and primary slates, while others are from the formations further west, and especially that lying on the valley (west) side of the Blue Ridge, and which I have designated as the first of the series of rocks of our great Appalachian system. These fragments of formation i., remarkable for their bright white color and their great magnitude, serve to distinguish the mass in which they occcur from the overlying diluvium, in which nothing analogous has as yet been discovered. Forming thus a part of what may be considered as ancient diluvium belonging to the secondary era, they point to the extensive agency of the currents by which the heterogeneous materials of these upper secondary strata were swept together."Rodgers's Report on the Geology of Virginia, 1839, pp. 36, 37.

See also p. 60 for a description of similar conglomerates and sandstones in the northern district east of the Blue Ridge.

That these immense masses were thus swept

towards the east, indicates that a resistless rush of the ocean took place in that direction at the upheaval of the mountains from which they were hurled by volcanic explosions, or torn by the surge and sweep of the waters. This and the transportation of the pebbles to such a distance, may have arisen in a measure from the elevation of the western side of the continent first. If, instead of being raised throughout at the same time, it was elevated first at the western side, so as to form a slope beneath the sea, descending one, two, or three miles towards the east, the sudden upheaval of the Cordilleras to within a few hundred feet of the atmosphere, would have thrown the vast mass of waters that before rested on the plains of Patagonia, Buenos Ayres, and Brazil, towards the Atlantic, so as to have drawn after them a current from the Pacific of hundreds of times the force with which it surges in an ordinary tempest, and swept the fragments ejected from the interior, and wrenched from the summit and sides of the mountain, to the distance of many miles; and its ceaseless waves would then, at every roll along the inclining bottom, have borne them still further into the depths. These stupendous processes, which were wholly impossible on the prevailing theory, might thus have been dispatched in a very brief period, instead of occupying the interminable ages which geologists assign them.

These views of the period at which the strata were formed, and of the causes of the submersion of the land beneath the sea, and the retreat of the sea from the land, indicate the reason that no human remains are found fossilized in the strata. Geologists generally allege the fact that no relics of the human race are buried in the rocks in which so many animals of the sea and land are entombed, as a decisive proof that man was not created till after these rocks were formed. That conclusion, however, is without any just ground. There is no reason to suppose that anterior to the flood, any of the human family lived in this hemisphere, in Europe, or in those parts of Asia or Africa, in which the strata have been examined. How, then, could their remains be entombed in the rocks of those regions? The strata, moreover, that now form the crust of the continents and islands, in the main, lay undoubtedly, previous to the deluge, beneath the sea, and were formed, at least chiefly, during the interval from the creation to that catastrophe. The primitive earth, occupied by the first pair and their descendants down to the flood, was then submerged-and doubtless by its own subsidence and still continues to lie at the bottom of the For how could it have sunk beneath the waters to so great a depth, unless on the one hand by its being depressed below the line it had before occupied, and on the other, by a corresponding elevation

ocean.

of the bed of the former sea? But such a subsidence of that ancient earth would have caused the ocean to rush on to it from every side, and carried its population and all other movable things from its exterior towards its centre, where they would naturally have sunk along with the wreck of their dwellings, fields, and forests, and been buried beneath the mud and sand with which the rushing waters would have become charged. To suppose that their bodies could have disentangled themselves from such a complicated mass, and floated off against the current to the other hemisphere, is to contradict the physical laws to which they and the movements of the ocean must have been subject. The total absence from the strata of this country, of Europe, of Africa, and Asia, of the relics of those then destroyed, is precisely therefore what was to be expected from the time and mode of their destruction. How could their remains be entombed in those strata which had been deposited before the epoch of the deluge, that swept them to their watery sepulchre? How could they obtain a burial in the seas where these strata were formed, when their distance was so great as to preclude their being borne to them? How extensive the continent, or continents and islands, of that world were, we have no means of judging. It is highly probable that they were of but moderate dimensions at their elevation on the third day of the creation; and they may have

been enlarged at subsequent periods, as the race multiplied, and still have been at the time of their submergence, at the deluge, greatly inferior in extent to the present dry land. On that supposition, portions of the present continents might have been elevated into the atmosphere sufficient to have borne the vegetable growths out of which the coal beds were formed, without rendering the aggregate of the dry land greater than it is now.

It is highly probable, also, that at the reappearance of dry land at the close of the deluge, the extent of the Asiatic continent, raised above the ocean, was comparatively small; and that the great processes by which the strata generally were completed, and the continents and islands elevated to their present positions, were continued through a considerable period after that event. And it may have been in reference to such a gradual reconstruction of the crust of the earth, that animals were preserved in the ark, notwithstanding as there is reason to believe there were to be new creations to stock the remote regions of Asia, and other continents and islands which were to be prepared to be peopled with animals more rapidly than those from the ark could multiply; or from their distance, the impassable barriers with which they were surrounded, and their different climates, were to require a creation on their own soil of peculiar genera and species. While, therefore, the