may still have produced an effect in warming the oceanic waters. The combined operation of these causes, of which we, perhaps, have some traces as late as the Carboniferous period, might well produce a state of things in which the earth was watered, not by showers of rain, but by the gentle and continued precipitation of finely divided moisture, in the manner now observed in those climates in which vegetation is nourished for a considerable part of the year by nocturnal mists and copious dews. The atmosphere, in short, as yet partook in some slight degree of the same moist and misty character which prevailed before the "establishment of the clouds above"--the airy firmament of the second day. The introduction of these explanatory particulars by the sacred historian furnishes an additional argument for the theory of long periods. That vegetation should exist for two or three natural days without rain or the irrigation which is given in culture, was, as already stated, a circumstance altogether unworthy of notice; but the growth during a long period of a varied and highly organized flora, without this advantage, and by the aid of a special natural provision afterward discontinued, was in all respects so remarkable and so highly illustrative of the expedients of the divine wisdom that it deserved a prominent place. It is evident that the words of the inspired writer include plants belonging to all the great subdivisions of the vegetable kingdom. This earliest vegetation was not rude or incomplete, or restricted to the lower forms of life. It was not even, like that of the coal period, solely or mainly cryptogamous or gymnospermous. It included trees bearing fruit, as well as lichens and mosses, and it received the same stamp of approbation bestowed on other portions of the work--"it was good." We have a good right to assume that its excellence had reference not only to its own period, but to subsequent conditions of the earth. Vegetation is the great assimilating power, the converter of inorganic into organic matter suitable for the sustenance of animals. In like manner the lower tribes of plants prepare the way for the higher. We should therefore have expected _a priori_ that vegetation would have clothed the earth before the creation of animals, and a sufficient time before it to allow soils to be accumulated, and surplus stores of organic matter to be prepared in advance: this consideration alone would also induce us to assign a considerable duration to the third day. After the elevation of land, and the draining off from it of the saline matter with which it would be saturated, a process often very tedious, especially in low tracts of ground, the soil would still consist only of mineral matter, and must have been for a long period occupied by plants suited to this condition of things, in order that sufficient organic matter might be accumulated for the growth of a more varied vegetation; a