"thrust themselves into the controversies of the

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times; they write books, move questions, frame distinctions, give solutions, and seem sedulously to do whatsoever the nature of the business requires; yet, if any skilful workman in the Lord's "mines shall come and examine their work, he shall find them to be but " Spirits in Minerals ;" " and that, with all their labour and stirr, there is nothing done." It is impossible not to perceive, how accurately this representation describes the results of the efforts of Mineralogy when it quits its sphere, and when it strives, by the solitary powers of its own science, to effodiate the fundamental truths of Geology. After all its labour and stirr, all its books, distinctions, solutions, and chemistry, it is easy to discern, "that there is nothing done." One while it works with water, another while with fire; yet, after all, no fundamental geological truth is brought to light. And, for this one plain reason; that there is no instrument whatever that can have power to bring out, or power to reach, that profoundly latent truth, but the Word of GOD Whose secret alone it is, and Who alone is able to divulge it. When once this infallible principle is thoroughly apprehended by the intelligence, it contemplates, with unfeigned regret, the efforts of genius which have been expended in striving to attain an end, which, by its nature, is and must ever be unattainable.

I here close this Comparative Estimate of the TWO GUIDES which offer to conduct us to a secure

knowledge of the history of our globe, with respect to the MODE of its FIRST FORMATIONS and the MODE of its SUBSEQUENT CHANGES. It only now remains for us, to determine our election between the Two; and to decide, whether we will choose the MINERAL GEOLOGY, with its nature and time, its chaos and chemistry, or, whether we will unite with BACON and NEWTON in adhering firmly to the fundamental principles of the MOSAICAL GEOLOGY, arising, altogether and exclusively, out of the CREATIVE WISDOM, the CREATIVE POWER, and the CREATIVE FIAT, of ALMIGHTY GOD.

SUPPLEMENT

TO

CHAPTER VI.— PART III.

PAGE 123.

On Caves in Limestone Formations, at Kirkdale and elsewhere, containing Fossil Animal Exuvia.

I HAVE found myself compelled to contest the particular geological explication of the KIRKDALE phenomena which has been proposed by the eloquent Professor of Mineralogy, because, whilst it places itself in array of direct opposition to the connected and unbroken chain of deductions which has been drawn out in the preceding argument, in evidence of diluvial transport, it is, in truth and plainly, not deduced by scientific or philosophical consequence from any first principles legitimately productive of it; but, is altogether an insulated hypothesis, taken up in medio of the subject, and principally governed and determined by the necessity of assigning a cause to one particular circumstance in the phenomena, viz. the disproportion between the dimensions of the orifice of the cave, and the natural bulk of the large animals whose exuvia are found within it; and assuming gratuitously, and without essaying the powerful evidence of the marine incorporations, that the limestone must necessarily have existed in its present consolidated state, and with its present cavity, at the time when the ani

mals were first lodged within it1. With this partial and uncombined view of the phenomena, it propounds at once, without laying any preparatory ground capable of sustaining the proposition, and without anticipating the very awkward consequences which must inevitably attend its admission, that the Cave at Kirkdale was, previously to the catastrophe of the deluge, a den of indigenous hyænas ; into which they conveyed their prey consisting of various animal genera, of which, some now exist only within the tropics, but, in that distant period, were native inhabitants of antediluvian Yorkshire. And, because entire carcases of elephants and rhinoceri were too large to have passed through the actual orifice and channels of the den, it at once assumes as an undeniable corollary or accessory, that the hyænas must have introduced them through that orifice," piece-meal and by fragments, into the inmost "and smallest recesses in which they are found"," either by individual industry or acting conjointly "with others." But, when we see a horse or a cow through a chink in a wall, we do not suppose that it must have passed through that chink; and therefore, when we find an elephant or a rhinoceros lying beyond and within a chink or fissure in a desiccated calcareous mass, too small to have admitted it, we are not authorised to assume, at once, that it must necessarily have passed through that chink, and to propose the means of its passage, unless it is quite certain that it could not possibly have gained its position by any other means; which, we have seen, is very far from being the case.

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Yet this assumed hyenas' den, which the sanguine author of the hypothesis confidently affirms to be a certain and established fact, is rendered by him the great

Reliquia Diluviana, p. 10. 3 Ibid. p. 37.

2 Ibid. p. 16.

Ibid. p. 96, 162.