And rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details.

WILLIAM BUCKLAND.

WILLIAM BUCKLAND, born A.D. 1784, died 1856, is the author of Vindiciae Geologice, Reliquiæ Diluviance, and of the Bridgewater Treatise on Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology.

WHAT GEOLOGY TEACHES.

Ir a stranger, landing at the extremity of England, were to traverse the whole of Cornwall and the north of Devonshire; crossing to St. David's, should make the tour of Wales, and passing thence through Cumberland, by the Isle of Man, to the south-western shore of Scotland, should proceed through the hilly region of the Border counties, or along the Grampians to the German Ocean, he would conclude, from his journey of many hundred miles, that Britain was a thinly-peopled and sterile region, whose principal inhabitants were miners and mountaineers.

Another foreigner arriving on the coast of Devon, and crossing the midland counties, from the mouth of the Exe to that of the Tyne, would find a continued succession of fertile hills and valleys, thickly overspread with towns and cities, and in many parts crowded with a manufacturing population, whose industry is maintained by the coal with which the strata of these districts are abundantly interspersed.

A third foreigner might travel from the coast of Dorset to the coast of Yorkshire over elevated plains of oolitic limestone, or of chalk, without a single mountain, or mine, or coalpit, or any important manufactory, and occupied by a population almost exclusively agricultural.

Let us suppose these three strangers to meet after the termination of their journeys, and to compare their

respective observations. The first would represent Great Britain as a thinly-peopled region of barren mountains; the second as a land of rich pastures, crowded with a flourishing population of manufacturers; the third, as a great corn field, occupied by persons almost exclusively engaged in the pursuits of husbandry.

These dissimilar conditions of three great divisions of our country result from the difference in the geological structure of the districts through which our travellers have been conducted. The first will have seen only those north-western portions of Great Britain, that are composed of rocks belonging to the primary and transition series; the second will have traversed those fertile portions of the new red sandstone formation, which are made up of the detritus of more ancient rocks, and have beneath and near them inestimable treasures of mineral coal; the third will have confined his view to wolds of limestone, and downs of chalk, which are the best adapted for sheep walks, and the production of corn.

Hence it appears that the numerical amount of our population, their varied occupations, and the fundamental sources of their industry and wealth, depend in a great degree upon the geological character of the strata on which they live. Their physical condition also, as indicated by the duration of life and health, depending on the more or less salubrious nature of their employments; and their moral conditions, so far as it is connected with these employments, are directly affected by the geological causes in which their various occupations originate.

From this example of our own country, we learn that the same constituent materials of the earth are not uniformly continuous in all directions over large superficial areas. In one we trace the course of crystalline and granitic rocks; in another we find mountains of slate; in a third, alternating strata of sandstone, shale, and limestone; in a fourth, beds of conglomerate rock; in a fifth, strata of marl and clay; in a sixth, gravel, loose sand, and silt.

The subordinate mineral contents of these various for

mations are also different: in the more ancient are veins of gold and silver, of tin, copper, lead, and zinc; in another series we find beds of coal; in another, salt and gypsum; many are composed of freestone, fit for the purposes of architecture; or of limestone, useful both for building and cement; others of clay, convertible by fire into materials for building and pottery: in almost all we find that most important of mineral productions--iron.

Again, if we look to the great phenomena of physical geography, the grand distributions of the solids and fluids of the globe, the disposition of continents and islands above and amidst the waters, the depth and extent of seas, and lakes, and rivers, the elevation of hills and mountains, the extension of plains, and the excavation, depression, and fractures of valleys, we find them all originating in causes which it is the province of geology to investigate.

A minute examination traces the progress of the mineral materials of the earth through various stages of change and revolution affecting the strata which compose its surface, and discloses a regular order in the superposition of these strata; recurring at distant intervals, and accompanied by a corresponding regularity in the order of succession of many extinct races of vegetables and animals, that have followed one after another during the progress of these mineral formations. Arrangements like these could not have originated in chance, since they afford evidence of method and law in the disposition of mineral matter, and still stronger evidence of design in the structure of the organic remains with which the strata are interspersed.

Geology has already proved by physical evidence that the surface of the globe has not existed in its actual state from eternity, but has advanced through a series of creative operations, succeeding one another at long and definite intervals of time; that all the actual combinations of matter have had a prior existence in some other state, and that the ultimate atoms of the material elements, through whatever changes they may have passed, are, and

ever have been, governed by laws, as regular and uniform as those which hold the planets in their course. All these results entirely accord with the best feelings of our nature, and with our rational conviction of the greatness and goodness of the Creator of the universe; and the reluctance with which evidences of such importance to natural theology have been admitted by many persons who are sincerely zealous for the interests of religion, can only be explained by their want of accurate knowledge of physical science, and by their ungrounded fears lest natural phenomena should prove inconsistent with the account of creation in Genesis.

DOUGLAS JERROLD.

DOUGLAS JERROLD, Novelist, Dramatist, and Essayist, was born A.D. 1803, died 1857.

A WINTRY TIME,

THE streets were empty. Pitiless cold had driven all who had the shelter of a roof to their homes, and the north-east blast seemed to howl in triumph above the untrodden Winter was at the heart of all things.

snow.

The wretched, dumb with excessive misery, suffered in stupid resignation the tyranny of the season. Human blood stagnated in the breast of want; and death in that hour of despair, losing its terrors, looked in the eyes of many a wretch to be a sweet deliverer. It was a time when the very poor, barred from the commonest things of life, take strange counsel with themselves, and in the humility of destitution, believe that they are the burden and offal of the world.

It was a time when the easy, comfortable man, touched with finest sense of human suffering, gives from his abundance; and whilst bestowing, feels almost ashamed that, with such wide-spread misery circled around him, he has all things fitting all things grateful. The smitten

spirit asks wherefore he is not of the multitude of wretchedness, demands to know for what excellence he is promoted above the thousand, thousand starving creatures; in his very tenderness for misery, tests his privilege of exemption from a woe that withers manhood in man, lowering him downward to the brute. And so questioning, this man gives in modesty of spirit, in thankfulness of soul. His alms are not cold, formal charities, but reverent sacrifices to his suffering brother.

It was a time when selfishness hugs itself in its own warmth, with no other thought than of its pleasant possessions, all made pleasanter, sweeter, by the desolation around; a time when the mere worldling rejoices the more in his warm chamber, because it is so bitter cold without; when he eats and drinks with whetted appetite, because he hears of desolation prowling like a wolf around his well-barred house; when, in fine, he bears his every comfort about him with the pride of a conqueror: a time when he sees in the misery of his fellow-creatures nothing save his own victory of fortune, his own success in a suffering world, when the poor are but the tattered slaves that grace his triumph.

It was a time, too, when human nature often shows its true divinity, and, with misery like a garment clinging to it, forgets its own wretchedness in sympathy with others; a time when in the cellars and garrets of the poor are acted scenes which make the noblest heroism of life; which prove the immortal texture of the human heart, not wholly seared by the branding-iron of the torturing hours; a time when in want, in anguish, in throes of mortal agony, some seed is sown that bears a flower in heaven.