essential to a just view of its revolutions and catastrophes, the Baron Cuvier presents a succinct detail of the efforts of preceding philosophers to account from second causes for terrestrial formations (8). The distinctive character of each is exhibited, and its soundness appreciated, by this profound writer, with the same acuteness which accompanies him in all his other researches; and the conclusions (9) which he forms respecting each, in all the systems which had amused the world during a century and a half, are such as to entitle the whole philosophy of first formations to the contemptuous definition, "the uncertain science," bestowed upon it by a fellow-labourer in geognostical research ("). To account for Creation, one violates the principles of astronomical science (1), and to assign the causes of Catastrophes, lapses into additional absurdity. The same effort at solution leads another into system at variance with the laws of motion, and the properties of matter (12). Hypothesis usurps in all the place of fact, and subordinate agencies the workings of the Great First Cause (15).

Fatigued with the review of those wanderings of science from the Origin of the mind which conceives it, and of the universe which affords it exercise, we pass from thence to the contemplation of truths, humiliating indeed to the intellect of man, but, as principles of philosophy, safe in their application and salutary in

E

their consequences. Those are, the insufficiency of Second causes to originate material phænomena independently of Creative power; and the incompetence of the human mind to the conception of this power, excepting so far as the reflex operation of sensible existences presents in its effects what is unappreciable in its

essence.

This dominion of the intellectual over the material-belief in which results from no choice of the mind, but from its utter incapacity to conceive in any other mode the commencement of material being-is a powerful predisposing fact in behalf of a system, which refers exclusively to the former as the originating and conservative energy. Such is the Hebraic Geology. By this one feature it is individualised. Removed alike from the crude philosophy of the Greek, and the masked hypotheses of the modern schools, it ascends for its principle to the Source of being, and views in the wisdom and the power there associated the germs of universal existence.

We proceed to offer some reflections on this philosophy, illustrative of the main purport of our inquiry. The order we shall observe is that of the sacred historian, which succeeding notices may demonstrate to be framed in a perfectly philosophical continuity.

It is remarked by a learned and ingenious

Commentator on this and other parts of the Sacred writings, that heathen mythologists were wont to preface their systems in terms corresponding to the Mosaic "In the beginning" ("). From this coincidence, however, nothing can be inferred respecting a community of origin, as it is natural to suppose that, reference to a period so remotely antecedent being contemplated, a term indicative of that reference has been adopted by all, and independently. We observe the same generality of expression in the Gospel of St. John, which opens with the Septuagint version of the Hebrew BERESHITH, and connects the doctrine of the pre-existent WORD with the Mosaical account of creation by the Elohim (15).

The question then occurs, to what point of duration are we to refer this general announcement? Whether to a period immediately antecedent to the developments indicated in the following verses, or to one indefinitely remote ?

This is not merely a question of speculation, but one which connects the Mosaical system, on the one hand, with Newton's doctrine of integrant molecules (1); on the other, with the views of the mineral geology (17). Creation is represented in the former as an energy of the First Cause, an exercise of his volition, at once originating the elements of matter, and assigning them their relations to space and to each

other. The hypothesis announced in the second is, that the primitive disposition of those molecules, in the framework of our globe, was a process of indefinitely extended duration (18).

The first aspect of those different views presents, as has been intimated, features of congruity with the record of Moses. It remains for ulterior discussion to ascertain the degree of assent to which either is entitled; as well that which admits the agency of a creative power, as that which seems to regard it as an occult cause; as well that which confines the first exercise of the Divine energy to the limit prescribed in the first chapter of Genesis, literally understood, as that which seems to depress it to the ordinary level of physical operation. At present it may be interesting to inquire, how far the epochs of the record may, agreeably to its literal interpretation, be made to consist with the second of those views, admitted as tenable to a certain extent.

The continuity of the narrative is preserved, in the authorised version of this chapter, through the first and second verses: it then commences anew at the third, and continues to the fourth inclusively. But we may comprehend the latter three verses in the same uninterrupted succession, by translating the particle which introduces the second, adversatively. For this we possess the authority of the Septuagint,

and the sanction of many passages in the sacred writings (1).

In truth, the concluding members of the second verse afford so probable an indication of the agency of second causes, impressed on the body of material elements by the Power which summoned them into being (°), (an agency which seems implied for the express purpose of marking the continuity of the epochs,) that the arrangement of succession to which we have adverted, appears at least an assumption not gratuitous, independently even of philological views.

The first verse may be regarded therefore, on those grounds, as prefatory to the clauses descriptive of secondary operations ;-as announcing a primordial act, to which these are relative, not as assemblages coexistent with, but consequent upon, its results; that namely of creative power, or as geologists express it, the mode of first formations: and it is important to remark, that the term used to indicate this act occurs not afterwards throughout the whole series of announcements to the eighteenth verse inclusive. We meet it not prior to the twenty-first verse, in which the Elohim is described as passing to the production of animal life, nor afterwards, until the twenty-seventh, in which it occurs thrice; as though it were intended, in both those instances, to mark by