nating from the condensation of a gaseous expansion in space; a notion often extended to the other planets, and supposed to be in harmony with the common direction of their motion round the sun, the nearly coincident planes of their orbits, and other less striking circumstances. That such gaseous or vaporous expansions exist in spaces is known both by observation of comets and of nebulæ."

La Place, it is said, was asked by Bonaparte why he never extended his views from secondary causes to the first great cause. That, it was replied, does not come within the field of our observation. But beyond what man could see, in respect to the condensation of our globe, from a void or vaporous mass to a consolidated form, we read what philosophers have not always considered,

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry (land) appear: and it

was so.

The gathering together unto one place is the law of each globe, by the condensation of the nebulous mass, and may be said to be visible in every degree of condensation. And the whole earth, as astronomers and geologists are agreed, was, as the most probable inference from existing phenomena, once a liquid mass, and covered all over with waters, or in a fluid form. And as at first the earth was without form and void, and astronomical observations show that such is the rudest and first visible state of matter; so geological discoveries, previously adduced in refutation of the saying of scoffers, that all things have continued as they were from the beginning of the creation, here supply as clear a commentary on the first scriptural description of the earth, when the waters had been gathered together into one place, and the dry and consolidated crust of the earth began to appear. That the (so termed) primitive rocks, which formed the highest mountain ranges, were elevated, by whatever cause, from below the level of the ocean into their present position, is held by geologists as an ascertained and undoubted truth.

When the previous progress of creation had converted amorphous, or formless and void, or vapoury matter, into a consolidated globe, on which the dry land appeared, a new act of creation covered it with verdure, and, with a word, God clad with beauty the world he had made.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth

brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning the third day. Ver. 11, 12, 13.

Phillips's Geology, p. 257.

Man, though not then the witness, was from the beginning the object of the Creator's bounty. Grass, herbs, and trees are now nowhere so abundant on the earth, as are still the collected remains of those which lie entombed within it, after the lapse of thousands of years since they flourished on its surface, when the grass was untrodden and the fruit untasted by man or by beast. Now ripened into produce, rich as apples of gold and of silver, the universal benefit they yield is a universal proof of their primeval existence. The vegetable origin of coal may be held as now an indisputed fact. "It is worthy of attention," says Phillips, "that, after the coal was deposited, reptile life began to be manifested, and, finally, to predominate; while, on the other hand, vegetable life, though the land was much more extensive, and apparently much more lowered in temperature, never yielded again such thick and extensive carbonaceous deposites."* "An abundance of distinctly preserved vegetable remains occur throughout the coal-fields of Great Britain. But the finest example I have ever witnessed," says Buckland, "is that of the coal-mines of Bohemia. The most elaborate imitations of living foliage upon the painted ceilings of Italian palaces bear no comparison with the beauteous profusion of extinct vegetable forms with which the galleries of these instructive coal-mines are overhung. The roof is covered as with a canopy of gorgeous tapestry, enriched with festoons of most graceful foliage, flung in wild irregular profusion over every portion of its surface. The effect is heightened by the contrast of the black coal colour of these vegetables with the light groundwork of the rock to which they are attached. The spectator feels himself transported, as if by enchantment, into the forests of another world; he beholds trees of form and characters now unknown upon the surface of the earth, presented to his senses almost in the beauty and vigour of their primeval life; their scaly stems and bending branches, with their delicate apparatus of foliage, are all spread forth before him; little impaired by the lapse of countless ages, and bearing faithful records of extinct systems of vegetation, which began and terminated in times of which these relics are the infallible historians. Such are the grand natural herbaria wherein these most ancient remains of the vegetable kingdom are preserved in a state of integrity little short of their living perfection, under conditions of our planet which exist no more."+

In these great natural herbaria are treasured up for the use of man the grass, and herbs, and trees which then decked the earth, and still enrich it; and yet remain to bear concur*Phillips's Geology, p. 119.

+ Buckland's Bridgwater Treatise, vol. i., p. 458, 459.