light.'

Nature has her mysteries. The earth has its great secrets. But over all,
a God of wisdom and goodness presides. Age after age has rolled
by--change after change has agitated the history of Time, as forms of
beauty have been moulded and marred--as songs of joy have been sung, and
requiems of sadness chanted in the great highways and quiet bypaths of
life--the living of bygone ages are slumbering quietly in the dust, and
the living of the present are hurrying to the same 'pale realms of
shade.' The nations of antiquity have passed off the stage with all
their grandeur and littleness, and the nations of more modern times are
surging and dashing to and fro, like ships in the wild chaos of ocean's
storms. God alone is great!

Changes, too, have been quietly going on beneath us in the earth's
bosom. A great dream of science, but perhaps an earnest, glowing
reality, suggests that when God's almighty power was rolling away the
curtains of darkness from earth's chaotic state--forming channels for
oceans and rivers, and heaving up as barriers the mountain chains of
earth, His eternal prescience of man's coming need induced Him to bury
deep down in subterranean recesses the imperfect vegetable organisms of
a pre-Adamic state, that in the ages to come, coals and oils and gases
might be drawn forth to supply his wants.

We find in the coal deposits traces of ferns and leaves of gigantic
stature and proportions. Casts of huge boles of trees are found among
our fossils, inducing the belief that in some bygone age quantities of
vegetable matter, absolutely enormous, were produced on the earth's
surface. And it is presumable that in some of the revolutions that have
agitated our planet, renovating, improving, and fitting it for a higher
order of life, mighty deposits of this vegetable matter were buried up
amid the rocky strata, to be evolved in new forms and products. And it
may be that since the days of Adam this vegetable deposit has been
undergoing the process of destructive distillation in the hidden regions
beneath. In this process heat would not be wanting: it is furnished by
the natural constitution of the earth.

Says Professor Hitchcock:

'Wherever in Europe or America the temperature of the air, water,
rocks, in deep excavations, has been ascertained, it has been found
higher than the mean temperature of the climate at the surface, and
experiments have been made at hundreds of places; it is f