when first inhabitable, more beautiful than it is now; and of its
gradually tending to still greater inferiority of aspect, and unfitness
for abode.

It has, indeed, been the endeavor of some geologists to prove that
destruction and renovation are continually proceeding simultaneously in
mountains as well as in organic creatures; that while existing eminences
are being slowly lowered, others, in order to supply their place, are
being slowly elevated; and that what is lost in beauty or healthiness in
one spot is gained in another. But I cannot assent to such a conclusion.
Evidence altogether incontrovertible points to a state of the earth in
which it could be tenanted only by lower animals, fitted for the
circumstances under which they lived by peculiar organizations. From
this state it is admitted gradually to have been brought into that in
which we now see it; and the circumstances of the existing dispensation,
whatever may be the date of its endurance, seem to me to point not less
clearly to an end than to an origin; to a creation, when "the earth was
without form and void," and to a close, when it must either be renovated
or destroyed.

Sec. 5. In one sense, and in one only, the idea of a continuous order of
things is admissible, in so far as the phenomena which introduced, and
those which are to terminate, the existing dispensation, may have been,
and may in future be, nothing more than a gigantic development of
agencies which are in continual operation around us. The experience we
possess of volcanic agency is not yet large enough to enable us to set
limits to its force; and as we see the rarity of subterraneous action
generally proportioned to its violence, there may be appointed, in the
natural order of things, convulsions to take place after certain epochs,
on a scale which the human race has not yet lived long enough to
witness. The soft silver cloud which writhes innocently on the crest of
Vesuvius, rests there without intermission; but the fury which lays
cities in sepulchres of lava bursts forth only after intervals of
centuries; and the still fiercer indignation of the greater volcanoes,
which make half the globe vibrate with earthquake, and shrivels up whole
kingdoms with flame, is recorded only in dim distances of history: so
that it is not irrational to admit that there may yet be powers dormant,
not destroyed, beneath the apparently calm surface of the earth, whose
date of rest is the endurance of the