Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1847, BY HENRY LONG & BROTHER, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New-York. PREFACE. Eternal truth! how wondrous is thy power, The hidden depths of thy profound embrace. THE present work is intended to furnish a general view of the leading appearances of Physical Nature-the economy of the heavens and the earth: deduced from Milner's "Gallery of Nature," Mantell's "Medals of Creation," and other authentic sources. Geology and Astronomy are, in truth, sciences whose discoveries have realized the wildest imaginings of the poet, and whose realities infinitely surpass, in grandeur and sublimity, the most imposing fictions of romance. RELICS FROM THE WRECK OF A FORMER WORLD. CHAPTER I. "The very ground on which we tread, and the mountains which surround us, may be regarded as vast tumuli, in which the organic remains of a former world are enshrined."-Parkinson's Org. Rem., Vol. I. ACCUSTOMED to consider the whole of nature as having sprung out of nothing at the Divine command in the course of a few days—and erroneously deeming this belief as essentially connected with the fundamental articles of Christian faith-it is little wonder when Hutton announced to the world that the earth offered no trace of a commencement, nor any prospect of an end, that he was assailed as an infidel. But time effects changes in the moral as well as the physical world, and such a belief is now considered no way obnoxious to a true interpretation of the sacred text. Some of our divines are among the most celebrated geologists, and the vast antiquity of the earth has become as fully accredited as if it had formed a distinct subject of revelation. A few cavillers are still to be found, but not among the enlightened portion of the Christian community. It is only from those who, assuming their preconceptions to be true, and their interpretations of Scripture right, that we find any opposition to the stubborn evidence of fact. "The hope of truth grows stronger day by day; And crushing them with din of grinding thunder Disputation is an irksome and thankless employment, and scarcely answers the purpose of conviction; because the mind naturally sets up its own old defences whenever its prejudices are attacked. "Men do not willingly," says the Rev. Thomas Milner, "abandon notions that have grown with their growth, and strengthened with their strength, and struck their roots deep and fast into their 'heart of hearts.' Besides being mortifying to intellectual vanity to admit an error, they disrelish the mental disturbance occasioned by the breaking up of old associations of ideas, and the toil which a correct conception of truth may require. Much of the suspicion with which the scientific have been visited, may be referred to prejudices in favor of early imbibed opinions, to which the demonstrations of science have been opposed-prejudices which are known in the pages of Lord Bacon as idola specus, the individual mind being the den to which that sagacious observer of human nature alludes, and repugnant as it is to the owner and guardian of the mental cavern to have its chambers of imagery searched, and the occupant of any niche ejected, men have been compelled repeatedly to submit to the process, however they may have resisted the attempt. A country schoolmaster may still discourse of the four elements-fire, air, earth, and water; and his boys may look up to him as a prodigy of erudition; but chemical analysis teaches us to smile at the enumeration, though old as the days of the Greek philosophers. So the antiquated notion of the earth being an extended plane, like a table,-as motionless as that household instrument, the sun coming to take his daily peep at it, like |