philology of Turrettine and the old Franciscans. I would, in any such case, at once, and without hesitation, cut the philological knot, by determining that that philology cannot be sound which would commit the Scriptures to a science that cannot be true. Waiving, however, the question as a philological one, and simply holding with Cuvier, Parkinson, and Silliman, that each of the _six_ days of the Mosaic narrative in the first chapter were what is assuredly meant by the _day_ referred to in the second,--not natural days, but lengthened periods,--I find myself called on, as a geologist, to account for but three of the six. Of the period during which light was created,--of the period during which a firmament was made to separate the waters from the waters,--or of the period during which the two great lights of the earth, with the other heavenly bodies, became visible from the earth's surface,--we need expect to find no record in the rocks. Let me, however, pause for a moment, to remark the peculiar character of the language in which we are first introduced in the Mosaic narrative to the heavenly bodies,--sun, moon, and stars. The moon, though absolutely one of the smallest lights of our system, is described as secondary and subordinate to only its greatest light, the sun. It is the apparent, then, not the actual, which we find in the passage,--what _seemed_ to be, not what _was_; and as it was merely what appeared to be greatest that was described as greatest, on what grounds are we to hold that it may not also have been what _appeared_ at the time to be made that has been described as made? The sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was not until this fourth period of creation that they became visible from the earth's surface. The geologist, in his attempts to collate the Divine with the geologic record, has, I repeat, only three of the six periods of creation to account for,--the period of plants, the period of great sea monsters and creeping things, and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is called on to question his systems and formations regarding the remains of these three great periods, and of these only. And the question once fairly stated, what, I ask, is the reply? All geologists agree in holding that the vast geological scale naturally divides into _three_ great parts. There are many lesser divisions,--divisions into systems, formations, deposits, beds, strata; but the master divisions, in each of which we find a type of life so unlike that of the others, that even the unpractised eye can detect the difference, are simply three,--the Palæozoic, or oldest fossiliferous division; the Secondary, or middle fossiliferous division; and the Tertiary, or latest fossiliferous division.