It cannot, then, be well denied that the astronomers and geologists here made it exceedingly probable that this earth on which we live has been brought to its present condition by passing through a succession of changes from an original state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps even from a mixture mainly consisting of gases; that such a body as the planet Jupiter represents one of the stages through which it has passed; that such a body as the moon represents a stage toward which it is tending; that it has shrank as it cooled, and as it shrank formed the elevations which we call mountains, and the depressions which contain the seas and oceans; that it has been worn by the action of heat from within and water from without, and in consequence of this action presents the appearance when examined below the surface of successive strata or layers; that different kinds of animal and vegetable life have followed one another on the surface, and that some of their remains are found in these strata now: and that all this has taken enormous periods of time. All this is exceedingly probable, because it is the way in which, as Laplace first pointed out, under well established scientific laws of matter, particularly the law of gravitation and the law of the radiation of heat, a great fluid mass would naturally change. There is nothing in that explanation to militate against the Scriptural accounts of the formation of the present world; and it may have pleased God to make use of the laws of gravitation and radiation of heat in order to bring our world into its present form. But the structure of the earth is not all, or nearly all. There is found on the earth, and within it, an infinite variety of substances. There are metals; such as gold, silver, lead, iron, etc. There are precious stones of gorgeous beauty, diamonds, rubies, etc., etc. There is vegetable matter of every description, from the tenderest blade of grass to the hard wood of the forest oak. And there are animals of all classes and all characters, from the lowest mollusk to the most perfect and elaborate vertebrate. And the question is, What made them? Were they produced by the cooling of the earth? Was it gravitation or radiation that made the gold, the ruby, the fern, the oak, the animal, and the water?