Miller frankly avowed that the view which he originally held as to the scientific interpretation of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis had been modified. He had believed, with Chalmers and Buckland, that the six days were natural days of twenty-four hours each; that the operations performed in them had reference to the world as inhabited by man; that a 'great chaotic gap' separated the 'latest of the geologic ages' from the human period; and the Scripture contained no account whatever of those myriads of ages during which the several geological formations came into the state in which we now find them. As his geological knowledge extended, and in particular, when he engaged in close personal inspection of the Tertiary and Post-tertiary formations, he perceived that the hypothesis of a chaotic period, dividing the present from the past, in the history of our planet, was untenable. 'No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness,' thus he announces the result of his investigations, 'separated the creation to which man belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus, and hyæna; for familiar animals, such as the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild-cat, and the badger, lived throughout the period which connected their times with our own; and so I have been compelled to hold that the days of creation were not natural, but prophetic days, and stretched far back into the bygone eternity.' It was legitimate for theologians, sixty years ago, to put their trust in the theory of a chaotic state of the planet immediately before the commencement of the human period, and to allege that Scripture had folded up all reference to preceeding geological ages, in the words 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' The authority of Cuvier was then supreme in the world of science, and Cuvier held that 'not much earlier than 5,000 or 6,000 years ago' the surface of the globe underwent a sudden and subversive catastrophe. But no theologian who now maintains this hypothesis can place his theology on a level with the scientific acquirement of the day. Dr. Kurtz is the only theologian of any standing who is known to us as still holding the view of Chalmers; and if we were asked how a person accurately acquainted with geological science might best obtain a conception of the untenability of the theory of a recent chaos, we should advise him to read Dr. Kurtz's defence of the hypothesis. The German divine repeatedly specifies 6,000 years as the period during which man and the existing order of terrestrial beings have occupied our planet. 'According to the Scriptures,' he says, 'the present order of things has existed for nearly 6,000 years.' He has a theory of his own on the subject of fossils. 'The types buried in the rocks were not destined to continue perpetually, or else have not attained their destination.' They were mere transient phenomena. It would be difficult to put into language a proposition more inconsistent with geological fact.