Changes, too, have been quietly going on beneath us in the earth's bosom. A great dream of science, but perhaps an earnest, glowing reality, suggests that when God's almighty power was rolling away the curtains of darkness from earth's chaotic state--forming channels for oceans and rivers, and heaving up as barriers the mountain chains of earth, His eternal prescience of man's coming need induced Him to bury deep down in subterranean recesses the imperfect vegetable organisms of a pre-Adamic state, that in the ages to come, coals and oils and gases might be drawn forth to supply his wants. We find in the coal deposits traces of ferns and leaves of gigantic stature and proportions. Casts of huge boles of trees are found among our fossils, inducing the belief that in some bygone age quantities of vegetable matter, absolutely enormous, were produced on the earth's surface. And it is presumable that in some of the revolutions that have agitated our planet, renovating, improving, and fitting it for a higher order of life, mighty deposits of this vegetable matter were buried up amid the rocky strata, to be evolved in new forms and products. And it may be that since the days of Adam this vegetable deposit has been undergoing the process of destructive distillation in the hidden regions beneath. In this process heat would not be wanting: it is furnished by the natural constitution of the earth. Says Professor Hitchcock: 'Wherever in Europe or America the temperature of the air, water, rocks, in deep excavations, has been ascertained, it has been found higher than the mean temperature of the climate at the surface, and experiments have been made at hundreds of places; it is found that the heat of the earth increases rapidly as we descend below that point in the earth's crust to which the sun's heat extends. The mean rate of increase of heat has been stated by the British Association to be one degree of Fahrenheit's thermometer for every forty-five feet: at this rate all the known rocks in the earth would be melted at a depth of sixty miles.' Here, then, are all the conditions necessary to the production of petroleum. The vegetable deposit was made amid the rocks--we know not when; internal heat has been decomposing that matter, and setting free its gases; these again have been condensed as they approached the surface, and have filled up the cavities, and accumulated amid the rocks, until in these last days the earth has literally poured us out rivers of oil. Still all this is mere speculation. The hidden path yet remains unexplored. It may always remain so; but we have the great fact of Divine providence in the rich and copious supply, that is none the less valuable because it flows from an unknown source, and comes to us through unexplored channels. THE ANGELS OF WAR.