the deputed lord of
the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future. We have
been looking abroad on the old geologic burying-grounds, and deciphering
the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other
burying-grounds, and other tombs,--solitary churchyards among the hills,
where the dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes
of the wise and good; nor are there awanting, on even the monuments of
the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics, and symbols of high meaning,
which darkly intimate to us, that while _their_ burial-yards contain but
the debris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the
sown seed of the future.

LECTURE THIRD.

THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL.

It is now exactly fifty years since a clergyman of the Scottish Church,
engaged in lecturing at St. Andrews, took occasion in enumerating the
various earths of the chemist, to allude to the science, then in its
infancy, that specially deals with the rocks and soils which these
earths compose. "There is a prejudice," he remarked, "against the
speculations of the geologist, which I am anxious to remove. It has been
said that they nurture infidel propensities. It has been alleged that
geology, by referring the origin of the globe to a higher antiquity than
is assigned to it by the writings of Moses, undermines our faith in the
inspiration of the Bible, and in all the animating prospects of the
immortality which it unfolds. This is a false alarm. _The writings of
Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe._"

The bold lecturer on this occasion,--for it needed no small courage in a
divine of any Established Church to take up, at the beginning of the
present century, a position so determined on the geologic side,--was at
the time an obscure young man, characterized, in the small circle in
which he moved, by the ardor of his temperament and the breadth and
originality of his views; but not yet distinguished in the science or
literature of his country, and of comparatively little weight in the
theological field. He was marked, too, by what his soberer acquaintance
deemed eccentricities of thought and conduct. When the opposite view was
all but universal, he held and taught that free trade would be not only
a general benefit to the people of this country, but would inflict
permanent injury on no one class or portion of them; and further, at a
time when the streets and lanes of all the great