e or
less completely broken down.

It is, to say the least, highly probable that this earth is a mass of
extremely hot matter, invested by a cooled crust, through which the
hot interior still continues to cool, though with extreme slowness. It
is no less probable that the faults and dislocations, the foldings and
fractures, everywhere visible in the stratified crust, its large and
slow movements through miles of elevation and depression, and its
small and rapid movements which give rise to the innumerable perceived
and unperceived earthquakes which are constantly occurring, are due to
the shrinkage of the crust on its cooling and contracting nucleus.

Without going beyond the range of fair scientific analogy, conditions
are easily conceivable which should render the loss of heat far more
rapid than it is at present; and such an occurrence would be just as
much in accordance with ascertained laws of nature, as the more rapid
cooling of a red-hot bar, when it is thrust into cold water, than when
it remains in the air. But much more rapid cooling might entail a
shifting and rearrangement of the parts of the crust of the earth on a
scale of unprecedented magnitude, and bring about "catastrophes" to
which the earthquake of Lisbon is but a trifle. It is conceivable that
man and his works and all the higher forms of animal life should be
utterly destroyed; that mountain regions should he converted into
ocean depths and the floor of oceans raised into mountains; and the
earth become a scene of horror which even the lurid fancy of the
writer of the Apocalypse would fail to portray. And yet, to the eye of
science, there would he no more disorder here than in the sabbatical
peace of a summer sea. Not a link in the chain of natural causes and
effects would he broken, nowhere would there be the slightest
indication of the "suspension of a lower law by a higher." If a sober
scientific thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild
vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less saintly person than
the seer of Patmos, might seem to be dictated by the fury of a
revengeful fanatic, rather than by the spirit of the teacher who bid
men love their enemies, it is not on the ground that they contradict
scientific principles; but because the evidence of their scientific
value does not fulfil the conditions on which weight is attached to
evidence. The imagination which supposes that it does, simply does not
"assume the air of scientifi