o
occur in the next hundred years, the entire district must be
depopulated, scarcely any animals or plants could survive, and the
surface would be one confused heap of ruin and desolation.

One consequence of undervaluing greatly the quantity of past time, is
the apparent coincidence which it occasions of events necessarily
disconnected, or which are so unusual, that it would be inconsistent
with all calculation of chances to suppose them to happen at one and the
same time. When the unlooked-for association of such rare phenomena is
witnessed in the present course of nature, it scarcely ever fails to
excite a suspicion of the preternatural in those minds which are not
firmly convinced of the uniform agency of secondary causes;--as if the
death of some individual in whose fate they are interested happens to
be accompanied by the appearance of a luminous meteor, or a comet, or
the shock of an earthquake. It would be only necessary to multiply such
coincidences indefinitely, and the mind of every philosopher would be
disturbed. Now it would be difficult to exaggerate the number of
physical events, many of them most rare and unconnected in their nature,
which were imagined by the Woodwardian hypothesis to have happened in
the course of a few months; and numerous other examples might be found
of popular geological theories, which require us to imagine that a long
succession of events happened in a brief and almost momentary period.

Another liability to error, very nearly allied to the former, arises
from the frequent contact of geological monuments referring to very
distant periods of time. We often behold, at one glance, the effects of
causes which have acted at times incalculably remote, and yet there may
be no striking circumstances to mark the occurrence of a great chasm in
the chronological series of Nature's archives. In the vast interval of
time which may really have elapsed between the results of operations
thus compared, the physical condition of the earth may, by slow and
insensible modifications, have become entirely altered; one or more
races of organic beings may have passed away, and yet have left behind,
in the particular region under contemplation, no trace of their
existence.

To a mind unconscious of these intermediate events, the passage from one
state of things to another must appear so violent, that the idea of
revolutions in the system inevitably suggests itself. The imagination is
as much perplexed