Such is the coincidence which some ingenious writers fancy they can trace between the history that is set forth in the written Word of God, and the history that is so curiously inscribed upon His works. Our readers, perhaps, will not be unwilling to consider it a little more in detail. We read in the first chapter of Genesis, that on the Third Day God said: “Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after its kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth. And it was so done. And the earth brought forth the green herb, and such as yieldeth seed according to its kind, and the tree that beareth fruit, having seed each one according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”[169] Let us now turn to the Carboniferous Period of Geology, which occupies a large space in the great Palæozoic age. All writers agree that it was specially marked by a gorgeous and luxuriant vegetation: and as we contemplate the multitudinous remains of plants and trees which have been gathered so abundantly in our coal measures, and ranged with such striking effect along the walls of our museums, we can scarcely help thinking that we have before us a practical commentary on the text of Moses. The gifted Hugh Miller, who is universally allowed to have been one of the most practical and experienced Geologists of the modern school, gives a very picturesque and graphic sketch of the Carboniferous flora. “In no other age,” he says, “did the world ever witness such a flora: the youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth,--a youth of dusk and tangled forests,--of huge pines and stately araucarians,--of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever dry land, or shallow lake or running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its ice-wastes under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and luxuriant herbage cumbered every footbreadth of the dank and steaming soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shown, through the enveloping cloud, with a green and delicate ray.”[170] Such an age as this might well be described in history as the age in which the earth brought forth the green herb, and the fruit-tree yielding seed according to its kind.