e stranded (as in the Farnham vale) where is
now dry land. Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and
falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more
gently each time, till as it were the panting earth, worn out with
the fierce passions of her fiery youth, has sobbed herself to sleep
once more, and this new world of man is made. And among it, I know
not when, or by what diluvial wave out of hundreds which swept the
Pleistocene earth, was deposited our little gravel-pit, from which
we started on our journey through three worlds.

When?

Enough for us that He knows when, in whose hand are the times and
the seasons--God the Father of the spirits of all flesh.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, take from hence a lesson. I have
brought you a long and a strange road. Starting from this seemingly
uninteresting pit, we have come upon the records of three older
worlds, and on hints of worlds far older yet. We have come to them
by no theories, no dreams of the fancy, but by plain honest
reasoning, from plain honest facts. That wonderful things had
happened, we could see: but why they had happened, we saw not.
When we began to ask the reason of this thing or of that, remember
how we had to stop, and laying our hands upon our mouths, only say
with the Mussulman: "God is great." We pick our steps, by lanthorn
light indeed, and slowly, but still surely and safely, along a dark
and difficult road: but just as we are beginning to pride ourselves
on having found our way so cleverly, we come to an edge of darkness;
and see before our feet a bottomless abyss, down which our feeble
lanthorn will not throw its light a yard.

Such is true science. Is it a study to make men conceited and self-
sufficient? Believe it not. If a scientific man, or one who calls
himself so, be conceited, the conceit was there before the science;
part of his natural defects: and if it stays there long after he
has really given himself to the patient study of nature, then is he
one of those of whom Solomon has said: "Though you pound a fool in
a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his folly depart
from him."

For what more fit to knock the conceit out of a student, than being
pounded by these same hard facts--which tell him just enough to let
him know--how little he knows? What more fit to make a man patient,
humble, reverent, than being stopped short, as every man of science
is, after each half-dozen steps, by