Yet even this is not all. For, after having examined all the rocks lower than the Jura, lower than the coal measures, lower than the silurian, and having reached the rocks which were formed before life began on the earth, geologists had still to examine the layers or strata placed higher than those like the Jura,

-for example, the plaster beds of Paris, and the layers of chalk, often of immense thickness, which are to be met with in Poland, Pomerania, and Normandy, and also in England.

They have done this, and what have they found? There, for the first time, they have seen in the rocks the mammiferæ and terrestrial animals (oxen, horses, bears, tigers, elephants), such as are never found in the rocks of the Jura; and also enormous unknown animals, first described by Cuvier, which you can only see in museums, and whose pictures I shall show you at the end of the lecture. But they have found no remains of man among them.

Well, once more I ask, What have the geoîogists concluded from these discoveries?

1st. They have concluded that, as the Bible

tells us, life has not always existed on the earth, and that the earnest observer may remark the very point from which it began. Life, then, began by a miracle; that is to say, by a direct intervention of creative power, contrary to what are commonly called "the laws of nature," or rather, before the existence of these laws.

2d. They have concluded that, as the Bible tells us, man is the youngest and last created of all the organized beings that the almighty God has placed on this earth.

3d. They have concluded that, as the Bible tells us, all the terrestrial animals, the large mammiferæ,-the elephants, the horses, the cattle, the rhinoceri,—are among the later creations which appeared on the earth before the creation of man.

4th and lastly. All geologists agree with the Bible in maintaining that the grand scale of geological fossiliferous periods is naturally divided into three great parts, which they have named Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary.

All are agreed, says the celebrated geologist, Hugh Miller, that what chiefly distinguishes the first of these three fossiliferous periods is not its shells or its fishes, though it possesses

a few, but its gorgeous flora." "It was emphatically the period of plants, of herbs yielding seed after their kind.' In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora; the youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth,-a youth of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria.” "Of this extraordinary age of plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses in the flames that roar in our chimneys when we pile up the winter fire,—in the brilliant gas that lightens our houses and streets,—in the glowing furnaces that smelt our metals and give moving power to our ponderous engines,—in the long dusky trains that, with shriek and snort, speed dart-like athwart our landscapes,—and in the great cloud-enveloped vessels that darken our friths and rivers, and rush in foam over ocean and sea.'

Coal mines, the remains of primeval forests, form the riches and the strength of a nation. In England alone, according to Buckland, coals do, by means of machinery, as much work as 400 millions of men could do by hand.