mass of the waters had been drawn from off the portion of the globe invested with vegetation; which sea-bed, had been formed by the disruption and subsidence of the other portion of the globe. Let us, therefore, carry our thoughts again into the structure of that bed, and into its apparently disordered and ruinous depths and recesses; I say apparently disordered, because, the circumstances of its mysterious alteration were as much directed to final purposes, by the Divine Wisdom, as the regularity of its first formation. The mineral materials, which retained their primitive order and position in the undisturbed dry land, were here fractured, severed, dispersed, and in various ways disturbed, and the soils, which had at first rested on their rocky bases, were necessarily displaced by the rupture of those bases; and, being precipitated into the new profundity, together with the innumerable fragments of the broken rocks, formed the slimy or the shingly bottom of the new sea. On that bottom, and in all the varieties of its parts, whether in its lowest depths or upon the submerged masses which lay upon it, marine matter of every kind, vegetable and animal, was produced in abundance, with the power of perpetual reproduction; and it continued to increase in quantity, in a multiple ratio, during a succession of many ages. This is a FACT, of fundamental concernment to TRUE GEOLOGY; and it will therefore behove the reader to engrave it deeply, and to retain it fixedly in his mind, until the

sequel of our argument shall cause us to return to it, under a new and a still more interesting aspect.

Thus, with the first created portion of the animal kingdom, the evening and the morning completed the Fifth Day.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE historian at length arrives at his Sixth Article; which is the last, in the history of the Creation of the constituent parts of this earthly system.

"And GOD said; Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind. And

"it was so.

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"And GOD made the beast of the earth after its kind, the cattle after their kind, and every thing "that creepeth on the earth after its kind. And "GOD saw that it was good.

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"And GOD said; Let us make MAN in OUR "IMAGE, after OUR LIKENESS; and let them have DOMINION over the fish of the sea, and over "the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over "all the earth, and over every creeping thing that "moveth upon the earth.

So GOD created MAN in HIS OWN IMAGE, "in the IMAGE OF GOD created He him: male and

"And GOD blessed them, and GOD said unto "them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and HAVE DOMINION over

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"the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and

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over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. "And GOD said; Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face "all the earth, and every tree in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed, to you it shall be for "meat; and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that moveth upon the earth wherein there is life, every green "herb for meat. And it was so.

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"And GOD saw every thing that HE HAD MADE, and behold it was VERY GOOD.

"And the evening and the morning were the 66 SIXTH DAY."

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;

The creation of MAN" in the image and likeness of Gov”κατ' εικονα και καθ ̓ ὁμοιωσιν Θεού, relates, and can only relate, to the intellectual, moral, and immortal nature with which the infinite goodness of God was pleased to invest him these are the only points of his nature, in which the most distant analogy can be traced to the nature of his infinite CREATOR. And, the " DO"MINION" with which God was further pleased to endow him " over all the earth" which He had now completed, shewed, that all that terrestrial creation was designed to be subordinate to the END for which He had placed within it that INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, and IMMORTAL BEING.

In this concluding article of creation, we are instructed; first, that this sixth day was marked

by a vast enlargement of the sphere of animal matter, completing the universal animal system, by the formation of every kind of animated being which was to inhabit and occupy the surface of the earth now provided with every variety of vegetable production. But, we are informed secondly, that the last animal structure of this creation, was that which God on this same day assigned to MAN, and into which He "breathed a LIVING SOUL:" uniting in his being, both a nature which bore analogy to His own divine nature, and a frame analogous, in its general laws, to the animal natures of the earth, though furnished with many excellencies above them; of which, the faculty of speech, for communicating intelligence, and the conformation of the hands, for executing the purposes of intelligence, are chief and pre-eminent. Thus MAN, by his animal nature, was linked to the system of this globe; but, by his moral nature, and by the unperishing essence of that nature, he demonstrated a disparity to that system, and a relation to a different and a far more exalted sphere'. This mineral globe, was formed and assigned for the temporary theatre of his being, and with the purpose of sustaining and serving the animal and vegetable

1 1 A conscious sense of this great and indelible truth, prompted the ingenuous, but imperfect statement of the heathen historian: "Nostra ❝omnis vis in animo et corpore sita est: animi imperio, corporis servitio "magis utimur: alterum nobis cum Dis, alterum cum belluis commune "est."-SALLUST, Proam.