the works effected during the years of disorder or tranquillity
would appear alike superhuman in magnitude.

He who should study the monuments of the natural world under the
influence of a similar infatuation, must draw a no less exaggerated
picture of the energy and violence of causes, and must experience the
same insurmountable difficulty in reconciling the former and present
state of nature. If we could behold in one view all the volcanic cones
thrown up in Iceland, Italy, Sicily, and other parts of Europe, during
the last five thousand years, and could see the lavas which have flowed
during the same period; the dislocations, subsidences, and elevations
caused during earthquakes; the lands added to various deltas, or
devoured by the sea, together with the effects of devastation by floods,
and imagine that all these events had happened in one year, we must form
most exalted ideas of the activity of the agents, and the suddenness of
the revolutions. Were an equal amount of change to pass before our eyes
in the next year, could we avoid the conclusion that some great crisis
of nature was at hand? If geologists, therefore, have misinterpreted the
signs of a succession of events, so as to conclude that centuries were
implied where the characters imported thousands of years, and thousands
of years where the language of Nature signified millions, they could
not, if they reasoned logically from such false premises, come to any
other conclusion than that the system of the natural world had undergone
a complete revolution.

We should be warranted in ascribing the erection of the great pyramid to
superhuman power, if we were convinced that it was raised in one day;
and if we imagine, in the same manner, a continent or mountain-chain to
have been elevated during an equally small fraction of the time which
was really occupied in upheaving it, we might then be justified in
inferring, that the subterranean movements were once far more energetic
than in our own times. We know that during one earthquake the coast of
Chili may be raised for a hundred miles to the average height of about
three feet. A repetition of two thousand shocks, of equal violence,
might produce a mountain-chain one hundred miles long, and six thousand
feet high. Now, should one or two only of these convulsions happen in a
century, it would be consistent with the order of events experienced by
the Chilians from the earliest times; but if the whole of them were t