Nor does the analogy terminate in the production, whether of one or many beds, of sand and gravel deposits. Simultaneously with these, there will be siltings and accumulations of various kinds of materials arranging themselves, at different depths, over the bottom of the ocean. The beds, too, will have their edges slid over each other, and where maintaining a degree of parallelism, the inclination of the more remote members of the suite will correspond with the increasing depth of the sea bottom. Then the imbedded remains will be as various as the different kinds, genera, and species of animals that frequent the different localities; nor will eruptive matter be always wanting to give diversity to the scene, indurating, dislocating, and disarranging the relative position of the deposits: Until we have formed, _within our present seas_, the whole complement of a geological formation—the calcareous, muddy, sandy, gravelly suites, cotemporaneous in origin and growth, with all their diversity of fossils, living and imbedded at the same period—some beds consisting entirely of microscopic or other marine bodies—some composed of vegetable and other mixed materials—some where the land and waters have mingled their spoils together—and all to be united and agglutinated into one great composite system by the dykes and eruptions of submarine volcanoes. These processes are all now in active operation; and, without straining the argument, the clear undeniable inference is, that, as the amount of materials accumulated and arranged in the modern, so will be the ratio of increase in the more ancient periods of the earth’s history and revolutions. And hence thousands, not millions of years, would, upon such inductions, be the scale of reckoning as to time.