LESSON XI.-THE VISION OF MOSES. 1. Most geologists suppose that the "six days" work of the creation, as described in the first chapter of Genesis, were a connected series of so many prophetic visions—a kind of diorama which passed before the prophet Moses-unfolding to him, in this inspired manner, the record of the works of the Almighty. The celebrated geologist Hugh Miller-a Christian and a scholar-has drawn a portraiture of this vision in language so beautiful that we can not forbear to insert it here. He supposes the "first day" to represent that "Primary period" ushered in by the first morn which dawned after a long night of chaos, and during which no life appears upon our planet. 2. "Let us suppose that the creative vision took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouchsafed, and that, as in the vision of St. John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A 'great darkness' first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the "horror;' and, as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly-troubled waters, like a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that 'in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' 3. "Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, 'Let there be light,' and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens toward the west. One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads: the faint light waxes fainter-it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits a while on his hill-top in darkness, solitary, but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night." 4. The "second day" is supposed to open about the close of the Transition period, when only a few plants and marine animals had appeared, and the view of the prophet rested upon a dark waste of troubled waters. "The light again brightens: it is day; and over an expanse of ocean without visible bound, the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great sea-invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic life; but from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. 5. "That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or gray, smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapor of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere, they lie, thick and manifold, an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent atmosphere, of a firmament stretched out over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below. But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the morning have completed the second day." 6. The "third day" is supposed to have dawned upon that early part of the "Secondary period" when the Carboniferous era had covered the earth with a wonderfully gigantic and abundant vegetation. 7. "Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud; but the scene has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Silurian or old red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone yesterday, and beats in long lines of foam, nearer at hand, against a low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely-spread country. For at the Divine command the land has arisen from the deep; not inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive, though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea-level; and a yet farther fiat has covered them with the great Carboniferous flora. 8. "The scene is one of mighty forests of cone-bearing trees—of palms, and tree ferns, and gigantic club mosses on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or sluggish stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky overhead; and, as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern-covered bank and long-withdrawing glade" 9. The "fourth day" is supposed to have dawned upon the middle of the Secondary period-perhaps the Saliferous eraand the vision, like that of the second day, pertains not to the earth, but to the heavens; as the vast mantle of cloud and dense vapor that had hitherto enveloped the earth had then disappeared, and the sun, moon, and stars may be supposed to have first become visible to the prophet. 10. "And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on, and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun rises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer hue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears fullorbed in the east to the human eye the second great luminary of the heavens-and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sca." 11. The vision of the "fifth day" may be supposed to open upon the latter part of the Secondary period, the "Age of Reptiles." 66 Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and ocean. There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. 12. "And ocean has its monsters: great 'tanninim' tempest the deep as they heave their huge bulk over the surface to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a 'seething pot or caldron.' Monstrous creatures armed in massive scales haunt the rivers, or scour the flat, rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends, the support and preservation of the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection and maintenance of the young." 13. The vision of the "sixth day" may be supposed to open near the close of the Tertiary period, when gigantic mammals possessed the earth. To the evening of this sixth day, in the eras of the Drift and Alluvium, man belongs-at once the last created of terrestrial creatures, and infinitely beyond comparison the most elevated in the scale; and with man's appearance on the scene the days of creation end, and the Divine Sabbath begins. 14. " Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and beasts of the fields graze on the plains; the thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles among the reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature-the lion, the leopard, and the bear-harbor in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for their prey amid tangled thickets or beneath some broken bank. 15. "At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases forever upon the earth. The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet another morrow-the morrow of God's rest-that Divine Sabbath in which there is no more creative labor, and which, "blessed and sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special object the moral elevation and redemption of man. And over it no evening is represented in the record as falling, for its special work is not yet complete. 16. "Such seems to have been the sublime panorama of creation exhib ited in vision of old to 'The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed. and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details." LESSON XII.-GEOLOGICAL AGENCIES NOW IN OPERATION. 1. HAVING briefly sketched the geological changes through which the crust or shell of our planet has passed during the myriads of ages of its past history, it will now be interesting to consider the geological agencies still in operation, which are continually producing new changes. 2. The atmosphere itself, with its alternations of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, wind and rain, storms and tempests, is gradually but constantly acting on the hardest rocks, causing them to crumble and become soluble, and thus preparing them, as soil, to enter into the minute rootlets of plants and nourish their growth. Thus hills and mountains are wearing down by atmospheric agencies, and the rain, the rivers, and the floods, are bearing the particles which compose them to the ocean. One of the first lessons which geology teaches is, that lofty mountains, "Whose tops appear to shroud Their granite peaks deep in the vapory cloud, 3. In this manner the land at the mouths of large rivers sometimes rapidly encroaches upon the sea. The delta of the Nile, formed of the mud, and sand, and gravel brought down from the high lands and mountains of the interior, is nearly as large as the state of Vermont: most of the lower part of Louisiana is the gift of the Mississippi; and it is stated that the annual deposit made by the waters of that river is sufficient to cover a township of six miles square to the depth of thirty feet. The Amazon brings down a still greater amount of materials, which, instead of forming a delta, are borne away by the ocean currents, serving to fill up "Ocean's plains," or perhaps to form new lands on distant shores. 4. The civil engineer who has seen his firm piers and walls demolished by the tremendous waves of an ocean storm, can well appreciate their powerful action as agents in modifying the rocky and earthy structure of the globe. In the Isle of Man a rock weighing two hundred pounds was lifted from its place and carried inland on a high wave of the sea; and in the Hebrides a block of forty-two tons was moved several feet by the force of the waves. The "stern and rock-bound coast" of the ocean every where feels the abrading power of the waves, as is shown by such projections as the "Pulpit Rock" at Nahant, and others equally picturesque along our whole Atlantic coast. 5. The sands and pebbles that are now so abundant in sand and gravel beds, were once broken from rocks, and worn into their present rounded forms by constant rubbing against each other in water. A history of one of these little pebbles— torn from some mountain peak of ancient continent by glacier, or avalanche, or frost, or tempest-making its way downward by mountain currents-borne onward by some ancient river to the ocean-buffeted there by the waves for ages, and finally deposited in some gravel-bed, would form an interesting picture of geological changes, which has myriads of counterparts in the slow formation of sand and pebbles in the rivers and oceans of the present day. 6. 7. "A wondrous traveler was of yore As he rolled along from shore to shore, Where ancient forests grew and waved, That little pebble journeyed on, In the river's bed below. Early and late he must have gone, No rest nor sleep had he, Until he slept in his gravel-bed 9. The destroying effects of waves have been disastrously exhibited in Holland, a country lower than the level to which the bordering sea rises during high tides and storms. The author of Hudibras has humorously described Holland as a country "that draws fifty feet of water;" but the inhabitants contrive to keep the sea from their lands by dikes or embankments. Sometimes the dikes are inadequate to withstand the force of the waters, and destructive inundations lay waste large districts of country. On the 17th of April, 1446, the sea broke in at Dort, and destroyed seventy-two villages and one hundred thousand people. At this time a large part of the Zuyder Zee was formed. In 1530 another great inundation occurred, in which four hundred thousand people are said to have perished. 10. The effects of glaciers and mountain slides in changing the aspects of mountain scenery have already been alluded to in the division on Physical Geography. Icebergs are glaciers formed in the higher latitudes along the coasts and in bays; and when torn from their moorings they often bear |