Mr. Richard Proctor says: “It has been shown that had past geological changes in the earth taken place at the same rate as those which are now in progress, one hundred millions of years at the very least would have been required to produce those effects which have actually been produced, we find, since the earth’s surface was fit to be the abode of life. But recently it has been pointed out, correctly in all probability, that under the greater tide-raising power of the moon in past ages, these changes would have taken place more rapidly. As, however, certainly ten millions of years, and probably a much longer time, must have elapsed since the moon was at that favorable distance for raising tides, we are by no means enabled, as some well-meaning but mistaken persons have imagined, to reduce the life-bearing stage of the earth from a duration of a hundred millions of years to a minute fraction of such a period. The short life, but exceedingly lively one, which they desire to see established by geological or astronomical reasoning, never can be demonstrated. At the very least we must assign ten millions of years to the life-bearing stage of the earth’s existence.” Astronomy has in the ranks of its professors many of its most able minds who do not believe in the sun and moon as two great lights, who cannot accept the myriad stars as fixed in the firmament solely to give light upon the earth, who refuse to believe in the heaven as a fixed firmament to divide the waters above from the waters beneath, who cannot by their telescopes discover the local heaven above or the local hell beneath, although their science marks each faint nebulosity crossing, or crossed, by the range of the watcher’s vision. To quote again from Mr. Goodwin:—“On the revival of science in the sixteenth century, some of the earliest conclusions at which philosophers arrived, were found to be at variance with popular and long established belief. The Ptolemaic system of astronomy, which had then full possession of the minds of men, contemplated the whole visible universe from the earth as the immovable centre of things. Copernicus changed the point of view, and placing the beholder in the sun, at once reduced the earth to an inconspicuous globule, a merely subordinate member of a family of planets, which the terrestrials had, until then, fondly imagined to be but pendants and ornaments of their own habitation. The Church, naturally, took a lively interest in the disputes which arose between the philosophers of the new school, and those who adhered to the old doctrines, inasmuch as the Hebrew records, the basis of religious faith, manifestly countenanced the opinion of the earth’s immobility, and certain other views of the universe, very incompatible with those propounded by Copernicus. Hence arose the official proceedings against Galileo, in consequence of which he submitted to sign his celebrated recantation, acknowledging that ‘the