tion of " abundantly." The same qualification is PART II. absent also in the Latin version of the Chaldee paraphrase. Yet the Hebrew verb implies abundance; its proper sense being that of scaturivit, progenuit abundè, as it is rendered by Castell; i. e. to breed, or produce abundantly. In this article is related, the first formation of animal matter by the immediate act of Almighty Power, i. e. by the mode of Creation; a mode, which appears to constitute the great tormentum of the mineral geology; from the constraint of which it is ever labouring to extricate its science, but from which it never can emancipate it. This amazing operation it states thus: "au bout d'un certain tems, ce liquide fut peuplé d'animaux1at the end of a certain time, this (chemical) liquid was peopled with animals." It does not tell us how, but observes; "c'est un trop grand sujet "--this is too great a subject, to treat in de 66 66 66 tail;" in order to maintain its spurious distinction, between the modes of mineral, and animal, first formations. Nor does it seem to be so much amazed at its being peopled then, as that it was not peopled before: "What is "astonishing, it says, and not less certain, there "have not been always living creatures on the CHAP. VII. 'DE Luc, Lett. Géol. p. 77. Ibid. p. 220. PART II. CHAP. VII. "earth'!" Unless it supposes that the earth always existed, it is difficult to understand the ground of its astonishment. For, if it supposes the earth to have had a beginning, the production of animals, on the fifth day of its formation, was early enough to have satisfied it. The same immediate operation of God, which, on the first day, gave perfect existence to His mineral system, and, on the third day, to His vegetable system; gave perfect existence, on this fifth day, to that first created part of His animal system, which comprehended every kind of marine and winged animal, in all the individuals pertaining to its first formation. These were formed in full maturity of structure, in all their component parts, by a mode disclaiming all secondary operation. And, though the bones of the first "whales" unquestionably bore the appearance of an ossifying process, as the textures of the first rock and of the first tree severally bore the appearances of a crystallizing and of a lignifying process; yet, that appearance was no indication. to reason, that they were produced by such a process; because reason perceives, that they acquired their ossified substance, and phænomena, CUVIER, Th. of the Earth, § 6. p. 38. before any process of ossification had begun to PART II. take place. Thus, marine animals of every kind, from the largest to the minutest, were produced "in abundance;" and swarmed in the depths of that sea, into which the general mass of waters had been drawn from off the surface of the globe which was now clothed with vegetable matter, and whose bed had been formed by the disruption and subsidence of the other portion of that same surface. Let us again carry our thoughts into the structure of that bed, and into its apparently disordered and ruinous depths and recesses; I say apparently disordered, because the circumstances of its alteration were as much directed by the Divine Wisdom, as the regularity of its first formation. The mineral materials, which retained their primitive order and position in the undisturbed dry-land, were here fractured, severed, and dispersed, or in various ways disturbed; and the soils, which had at first rested on their rocky bases, were necessarily displaced by the rupture of those bases, and being precipitated into the new profundity, together with the innumerable fragments of the broken rocks, formed the slimy or the shingly bottom of the new sea. On that bottom, and in all the varieties of its parts, whether in its CHAP. VII. CHAP. VII. PART II. lowest depths, or upon the submerged masses which lay upon it, marine matter of every kind, vegetable and animal, was produced in abundance, with the power of perpetual reproduction; and it continued to increase in quantity, in a multiple ratio, during many ages. This is a fact, of the utmost concernment to a true geology; and which it will therefore behove the reader to impress deeply, and to retain fixedly, in his mind. CHAPTER VIII. CHAP. VIII. THE historian at length arrives at his Sixth PART II. "And GOD said; Let the earth bring forth "the living creature after its kind, cattle, and "creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its "kind. And it was so. "And GOD made the beast of the earth after "its kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth on the earth after its kind. "And GOD saw that it was good. "And God said; Let us make MAN in OUR IMAGE, after OUR LIKENESS; and let them "have DOMINION over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that moveth upon the earth. 66 "So GOD created MAN in HIS OWN IMAGE, "in the IMAGE OF GOD created He him: male "and female created he them. "And GOD blessed them, and GOD said unto |