But to state the argument in this form is vastly to underrate the forces of nature in the primeval times. There are, on the contrary, the strongest reasons for believing that the two classes of phenomena can bear no proportion to each other, either as to the manner of or the periods occupied in their formation. The bulk of dry land, compared with water, was then, as all geological appearances testify, perhaps only a twentieth instead of a third part, as now, of the supermarine area of the globe. How infinitely greater, therefore, would be the action of the waters over all the materials subject to their disintegrating power, whether upon the islands and continents already raised above their waves, or upon the immense submarine tracks of rock just lifting up their peaks and waiting to be elevated into air? Nor in alluding to volcanic products can we fail to perceive how immensely inferior are the modern to those of the palæozoic ages, when all the great mountain-ranges were bursting into position; the American continent, not as now with a few isolated eruptive centers, but rending all over, as the mighty Andes and Cordilleras were rising above the deep and assuming outline; and in every quarter of the globe the plutonic, erosive, and denuding agencies were upon a scale of corresponding magnitude. Leibnitz, in his “Protogæa,” has long ago anticipated these views, where, in the masterly sketch of his leading geological canons, he distinctly refers to the more intensive energy with which physical causes must have acted in primordial times; and considers that these disruptions of the earth’s crust, from the disturbances communicated to the incumbent waters, must have been attended with diluvial action on the largest scale. The _maximæ secutæ inundationes_, thereby occasioned, had produced their natural effects, when the period of repose succeeded—the _quiescentibus causis, atque aequilibratis, consistentior emergeret rerum status_, as he so beautifully describes one out of many recurring stages of paroxysm and repose during the Course of Creation.