While these statements show that we are still but imperfectly acquainted with all the conditions and circumstances under which coal was formed, two deductions may be made from them, not only as against the rival theories themselves, of Murchison and Lyell, but still more strongly against the application of either theory to existing causes in the formation of the true bituminous product. In the first place, the vegetable matter brought down by the rivers, and spread over the bottom of the sea, does not amount to an infinitesimal fraction of what constitutes the enormous compound of the carboniferous age; and a different effect, according to the laws of nature of which we have experience, will necessarily result from the causes now in operation. Secondly, whatever, as a question of fact, it may have been with our coal-basins in the times gone by, certain it is that NOW there are no such oscillatory movements, causing the required changes in the relative level of sea and land, in those quarters of the globe the most densely covered with forests and jungle, and out of which the new coal-measures are expected to rise. The thin accumulations of woody residuum, observed by Sir Charles Lyell, in the sections exposed along the banks of rivers, railways, and other passages through American prairies and forests, are all unfavorably circumstanced—firm as the everlasting hills on their rocky foundations. We may be reminded of the numberless ages required for the production of coal, that man’s experience is but of yesterday, and himself an ephemeral of a moment as compared with the revolutions of time recorded on the fabric of the globe. This record, we have reason to think, should be vastly abridged. But grant it, for the sake of argument, in all its indefinite dimensions, and still the answer is, that a moment in a question of this kind is just as instructive as the lapse of a million of years. Time, while it witnesses change, does not create or of itself produce anything. It is rather a passive than an active agent. Time marks on its horoscope the effects of existing causes, but the causes themselves it neither fashions or eliminates. Geologists enter into minute calculations as to the annual decay of vegetables, and the transporting powers of water, the waste of forests and the uptearing of hurricanes. Grant them all to be correct, and the data in these respects to be unchallengeably sound, we again beg them to consider that the Mississippi bears on its bosom the earthy spoils of half a continent—that the Ganges mixes in its fabled flood the varied wreck of all the Himalaya,—and when all are duly borne onward by these and the mighty rivers elsewhere on the globe, that the arrangement of the mingled composite has yet to be effected—the clays, sands, coals, conglomerates, all in their serial superposition—the separation of the clean from the unclean—and where is the agency thus to dispose and to proportion? The deep says, it is not in me.