great mountains. This may have been so. It was an an cient opinion that Thessaly was a lake. It is now thought, that the country through which the Rhine flows was likewise such. The basin in which the Lake of Constance still remains, was one of these. Another has been traced in Baden, from Upper Alsace to Mentz. A series of the same sort has been found to accompany the course of the Danube. Bavaria was a vast lake: the Austrian dominions, from Passau; and another up to Presburg. Hungary is a great circular basin of an anterior sea. The Bannat is another, but smaller. The plains of Moldavia and Wallachia, up to the Black Sea, present a similar valley, that was once covered with water. The Black Sea, the Sea of Marmora, and the Mediterranean, are but a continuation of these; but being the lowest of all these regions, and on a level with the general ocean, the waters here remain as seas, because they cannot find a lower place.* The gradual dissemination of mankind and of animals must have been always governed by the state of each locality. One consequence of this inundated state of many parts of the earth would be, that marine plants would overspread its surface below the waters, and that its first inhabitants, where they prevailed, would be marine animals. Shellfish * Aristotle notices the changes of countries by the gradual disappearance of their waters from them. "This happened to Hellas, and about the regions of Argos and Mycena; for in the Trojan times, the regions about Argos being in a watery state could maintain but few; whereas Mycenae was better off in this respect, and therefore had the higher honour; but now, its land has altogether dried up and become sterile. What was then barren from its laky state, has now become productive. "What has happened in this district, which is small, has also OCcurred in extensive places and in whole regions; for many parts which were formerly under water have now become continents, and the contrary. In many places the sea has come upon the land."-Arist. Meteor. 368. He remarks this change in Egypt. "The watery places drying by degrees, the neighbouring districts became inhabited. We say that the Egyptians are the most ancient of men, but all their region appears to have been made, and to be the waste of the river."-Ib. "The places near the Red Sea sufficiently show this. One of their kings tried to break through the Isthmus here. Sesostris is said to have been the first of the ancients who tried this, but he found the sea higher than the land. Hence it is manifest that all these things were one continued sea. Wherefore it appears that the part about Libya, the Ammonian region, is lower and moro hollow."-Ib. would multiply on the banks and ground beneath. Fish would float, live, and die in the moving streams above; while every summer, as the mountain ices melted, and the spring rains descended, the rivers would bring currents of disintegrated hills, and of muddy soil, to deposite on the beds over which they should flow; and thus, every year, or at frequent intervals, forming new layers of strata from the materials they would carry with them. These facts will account for rocky masses and strata with no fossil remains, but those of marine animals and plants. As long as the waters anywhere covered the surface, these only could live and multiply in them; and, therefore, all the earliest relics of organized life must have been, and are found now to be, of this description. It was not until the ground became divested of the superincumbent fluid, that quadrupeds could occupy, or that land-vegetation could be diffused. These would be the next occupants, and the only ones, until human colonizations penetrated into the regions. But it is everywhere found, that the animal classes diffuse themselves more rapidly than the human race, whom plants and forests always precede. The next series of remains, after the marine, will therefore be of quadrupeds and dry-ground plants and trees. Bones of mankind will be rare; and rarer from the habit of many tribes of burning their dead. Even where this custom did not prevail, the social habit of congregating in towns, and of being buried in some general cemetery, would prevent any human fossils from appearing in the rocks and strata of the earth, or anywhere but in close vicinity to these frequented cities. But we must not mistake the local appearances of only the simple marine plants and animals, as evidences that no other then existed on the earth; or when the fossil remains of quadrupeds solely are found, infer that man had not then been created. His absence proves that his population had not spread into those parts where he has left no relics of his presence; but it proves no more-non-diffusion is not non-existence.* *On the main principle of this letter, I quote with much pleasure a fine passage of the Rev. A. Sedgwick's concluding address to the British Association of Cambridge in 1833:-"There is in the intellect of man an appetence for the discovery of general truth; and by this appetence, VOL. II.-Ff LETTER XXIII. The Natural Scenery of the Earth made to be everywhere Beautiful and Interesting-Instances of its Effect on various Minds in the different Regions of the World. MY DEAR SON, OUR considerations on the surface which was established at the deluge, for the subsistence and habitation of mankind and of the rest of animated nature, have been directed to the effects and utilities which have been derived from it, in producing and maintaining the present course of nature, the social economy of mankind, and their general convenience and comfort. But as we contemplate the aspect of all that surrounds us, we can read most legibly in the expanded volume of nature before us, that another principle of the divine Mind has been in liberal activity for our benefit; and this is that affectionate regard for his human race, which the Scriptures term the love of God for man, which goes far beyond what we term reasoning or philosophic philanthropy, or that moral principle which contents itself with seeking the welfare of its human objects. He has not been satisfied with doing us good, and providing largely for our necessities and wellbeing; his feeling towards us has been more kind and endearing. He has been solicitous to give us pleasure in his various creations, as well as food, comfort, and safety. He has, therefore, enlarged his plan and contrivances, to add multiplied and diversified means of easy and continual enjoyment, beyond our bodily gratifications; purely to ex in subordination to the capacities of his mind, has he been led on to the discovery of general laws; and thus, his soul has been fitted to reflect back upon the world a portion of the counsels of his Creator. If I have said that physical phenomena, unless connected with the ideas of order and of law, are of little worth, I may farther say, that an intellectual grasp of material laws of the highest order has no moral worth, except it be combined with another movement of the mind, raising it to the perception of an intelligent FIRST CAUSE. It is by help of this last movement that nature's language is comprehended; that her laws become pregnant with meaning; that material phenomena are instinct with life; that all moral and material changes become linked together; and that truth, under whatever forms she may present herself, seems to have but one essential substance."-Report Brit. Assoc. 1833, p. xxx. oite pleasurable sensation in us, and to make us happy, while he sustained and blessed us with all that our daily wants require. In the former letters, the operation of this principle of the divine love for mankind was brought to your notice in the remarks on the floral beauties of creation, and on the rich fruits which his vegetable bounty has provided so numerously for us. Its activity is not less visible in his arrangements, configuration, and investiture of the present surface of our earth. He has so managed these dispositions of it, that the natural scenery which it presents to us is in every region expanding around us a continual succession of visual beau ties, which excite the mind in every country to an exhilarating delight. He has so shaped and distributed the masses, rocks, hills, valleys, mountains, and plains of our earth, and so clothed them with plants and trees, that their appearances at due intervals, and in ever-varying succession, are always cheering and interesting to the human eye. It is by the deliberate and skilful placing and forming them into the fit outlines and figures, and with the due mutual relations, colours, and contrasts, that they raise within us, as we approach them, those intellectual emotions to which we attach the terms sublime and beautiful, picturesque and charming, wild, interesting, and elegant, with many other epithets that mark the gladdening sensations and pleasing sympathies which we experience from them. Every one feels effects of this sort, who looks around him at the natural scenery of the country in which he resides, or through which he may be travelling. Whatever be the region and quarter of the globe that he traverses, whether in the torrid, the temperate, or even the frigid zone, still his eye is struck with views and prospects which animate and please him. The variety of the local causes of these impressions is infinite; but the intellectual effect is universal and unceasing. Beauty and grandeur, the admirable, the interesting, the welcomed awful, the attractive strange, the gratifying peculiar, something that elevates, or sooths, or captivates, or pleasingly excites; something that causes a feeling of interior delight, is perpetually occurring to him as he moves over the territorial surface, whatever clime he may be visiting. The hand of nature, or rather the creative mind of its divine Maker and Master, is ever placing before him, in tasteful combinations and successions, pictures of natural scenery and phenomena, that exhilarate or astonish him; and that have suggested all the beauties of the artificial landscapes which poets have sung, and which the genius of our imitating arts has so captivatingly painted. So much contrast of a different description is intermingled, as makes what is pleasing more pleasurable, and prevents the gratification from becoming too uniform and satiating; and from this varying intermixture, even the disagreeable ceases to be so, as it always enhances our relish for what is otherwise, and increases our desire to meet with something more interesting. The result of the combined whole is, that travelling is always delightful, and change of scene a continual recreation to the mind; since we can go nowhere without feeling gratifying emotions and sensations to be rising within us, from the new places we gaze upon, whatever be the district to which our bodily movement may take us. Impressions so perpetual and universal as these, can never be individual imaginations only. They must arise from local and beheld realities-from external things actually subsisting, of such a nature and character, and with such relations and associations, as to cause the feelings and perceptions to occur to us which we so generally experience from them. But for effects like these to be so constant, there must have been a correspondent plan, construction, and arrangement of what thus causes them; and these must have been designed and made with foreseen anticipations of their effect, and with due adaptations to our nervous sensitivities, for the express purpose of exciting in our spirit, through and by these, the emotions and impressions which we are conscious of from them. These creative provisions are not of one sort only. The pleasure is not of one kind merely,no single charm. The scenes and objects which produce it are exceedingly multifarious and diversified. They may be mentioned by the enumeration of thousands, without our reaching their amount. The invention which has contrived, and the condescending goodness which has executed, what it designed, must have had no limit. They must have been studiously devised and elaborately produced; and with generous desire to multiply our gratifications by very numerous diversity, for they are as varied and as exuberant as the results are universally and individually interesting. Yet all |