"Nor aught nor nought existed: yon bright sky Was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above. What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed? Was it the water's fathomless abyss? * * * Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled In gloom profound--an ocean without light; The germ that still lay covered in the husk Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat." It is evident that the state of our planet which we have just been considering is one of which we can scarcely form any adequate conception, and science can in no way aid us, except by suggesting hypotheses or conjectures. It is remarkable, however, that nearly all the cosmological theories which have been devised contain some of the elements of the inspired narrative. The words of Moses appear to suggest a heated and cooling globe, its crust as yet unbroken by internal forces, covered by a universal ocean, on which rested a mass of confused vaporous substances; and it is of such materials, thus combined by the sacred historian, that cosmologists have built up their several theories, aqueous or igneous, of the early state of the earth. Geology, as a science of observation and induction, does not carry us back to this period. It must still and always say, with Hutton, that it can find "no trace of a beginning, no prospect of an end"--not because there has been no beginning or will be no end, but because the facts which it collects extend neither to the one nor the other. Geology, like every other department of natural history, can but investigate the facts which are open to observation, and reason on these in accordance with the known laws and arrangements of existing nature. It finds these laws to hold for the oldest period to which the rocky archives of the earth extend. Respecting the origin of these general laws and arrangements, or the condition of the earth before they originated, it knows nothing. In like manner a botanist may determine the age of a forest by counting the growth rings of the oldest trees, but he can tell nothing of the forests that may have preceded it, or of the condition of the surface before it supported a forest. So the archaeologist may on Egyptian monuments read the names and history of successive dynasties of kings, but he can tell nothing of the state of the country and its native tribes before those dynasties began or their monuments were built. Yet geology at least establishes a probability that a time was when organized beings did not exist, and when many of the arrangements of the surface of our earth had not been perfected; and the few facts which have given birth to the theories promulgated on this subject tend to show that this pre-geological condition of the earth may have been such as that described in the words now under consideration. I may remark, in addition, that if the words of Moses imply the cooling of the globe from a molten or intensely heated state down to a temperature at which