MR. GRANVILLE PENN.

71

of the first decrees of the Almighty (See his Geological Letters to Professor Blumenbach, edited by M. de la Fite, 1831'.) But I can also forgive Mr. Granville Penn for thinking that without the intervention of any chaos it was in the power of God, to have brought this planet into existence for man's habitation by merely calling it, or rather commanding it into being. In both these cases much must depend upon conjecture, and where conjecture begins, I have

1 It is probable that I may have no better opportunity of relating some rather remarkable circumstances connected with the above work. The date of its publication I have shown to be 1831; and, in a list of new works, bound up with it, the Letters of De Luc, which it contains, are openly stated to be, "now first translated from the French." The reader may guess my surprise at reading this, when he is informed that I had myself translated them from the French, so long before, as in the years 1793, 1794, and 1795, not perhaps from the actual original Letters to Blumenbach, but from copies in De Luc's own hand-writing, supplied by himself, and countenanced, as I understood, by Blumenbach, who had previously translated them into the German tongue. The mistake was quite accidental. Nothing could be imputed to M. De la Fite, (since dead, I lament to say,) who began his book with an immediate notice of my translations, as they appeared in the old series of the "British Critic," and more than once refers to my Bampton Lecture (mentioning it always as the work of Dr. E. Nares, thereby distinguishing me from my late worthy relative, Archdeacon Nares, with whom I have been so continually confounded, that I much question whether my existence, as. the author of my own works, would not be disputed to this day, in most of the booksellers' shops in London.) I could not well refrain from noticing this otherwise trivial affair, in referring to M. de la Fite's republication of De Luc's Letters, especially as Mr. Sharon Turner, from a note in his late very curious Sacred History, &c., appears never to have seen the Letters before. In the year 1798, M. de Luc having revised and partly recomposed his Geological Letters, published them again at Paris, under the title of "Lettres sur l'Histoire Physique de la Terre." M. de la Fite having had the advantage of this last republication, his translation, of course, is so far preferable to my own; though the latter had, at the time, the entire

72

A CHAOS DOUBTFUL.

recourse to God's word, that being the authority I can best confide in, wherever man's explanation of things falls short.

A

If I am not very inquisitive then about the Tohu-ve-Bohu of Moses, as some writers have been (no doubt with the very best intentions), it is merely because I feel that the decision of any such question, as, whether there was or was not a chaotic mass of elementary principles, whence all things came to be what they are, by a mixture of chemical and mechanical processes, is not essential to the stability of my faith in the holy Scriptures; I am contented to know just as much as Moses has told us, namely, that "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” that is the heaven, and the matter at least of the planet, or perhaps of the whole planetary system to which we belong; and that at some given period, our own planet, the only one in the whole compass of the universe, with which we can pretend to be at all familiarly acquainted, was so unfit for the habitation of man, so unprovided with the abundance of things we now see around us, of use and ornament, comfort and convenience, as to be comparatively, "without form or void," or as Mr. Penn renders it, and perhaps with the weight of authority on his side, "invisible and unfurnished." I am not desirous of reviving a chaotic geology, if it may be said to be with general consent abandoned, but as the idea of a chaos has prevailed through many ages, and it seems doubtful whether the heathen poets from Hesiod downwards, did not obscurely refer to the account of Moses, I shall offer some remarks, on this well known origin of things, with a hope of, at the least, clearing away some injurious misrepresentations.

ANTI-CHAOTIC SYSTEMS.

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M. De Luc and Mr. Penn', may with good reason be brought forward at this time as the champions of the chaotic and anti-chaotic systems; the former having the support of almost all antiquity, the latter of Bacon and Newton, as he insists, and also of certain critics and Biblical scholars of no mean name, particularly Rosenmüller. I shall offer a few observations upon both, begging, however, to be understood as writing simply for the information of those who are not confirmed geologists, but in the way of becoming acquainted with the writings, lucubrations, and proceedings of those who are, many of whom, I am quite willing to believe, are not aware of the unfortunate tendency of some of the very terms and expressions used in the display of their opinions, and upon which I shall have to offer some remarks.

M. De Luc admitting a chaos, (as well described perhaps by Ovid, at the commencement of his Metamorphoses3, as by any writer before or since1), conceives it to have been an heterogeneous mass of elementary ingredients, incapable of reduction into order, without the addition of some principle, which by

1 To Mr. Penn may now be added Mr. Fairholme, whose geology of Scripture had not been published when this was first written: had 1 seen it in time, it is probable I might have relinquished the present undertaking; but some passages in Mr. F's introductory chapter, have determined me to proceed.

2 Bampton Lecture, p. 279.

I refer to Ovid, because the very idea of a chaos is now so exploded by certain geologists, that I had rather have my reference to such a commencement of things attributed to a mere school-boy predilection, than to any more mature opinion of my own, as a cosmogonist, or philosopher; besides Mr. Lyell himself, very fairly refers to the same classical authority for some support on the part of Pythagoras.

4 See Lyell's reference to Ovid, xv.

5 See De La Fite, p. 43. 52.

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PROPERTIES OF LIGHT

producing liquidity, might give scope for chemical operations and combinations. To this principle, the very principle apparently wanting to Werner's own system', M. De Luc judged, that he had been regularly conducted by his philosophical investigations of the properties of light, and we ought not to wonder that having worked his way back, as it were, analytically to such a first principle, he should be struck with the extraordinary agreement between his assignment of the commencement of physical operations, and the first grand and sublime fiat of the Almighty, "LET there be LIGHT." For the credit of De Luc, this should be particularly attended to; he never meant to make more of secondary causes, than as he could trace them up to a first cause. The following I copy from a MS. of his own. "Is it possible to determine, from clear monuments, what has been the first observable effects produced, by physical causes, on our globe?" having as he thought found the first principle of such causes and effects, in light, the next step he knew to be to the fiat of God, as recorded by Moses. There his physicul researches terminated; he recollected possibly the magnificent but unanswerable question put by the Almighty to Job, "Where is the way where light dwelleth?" that he presumed not to say, but spake only of its effects, as a first physical cause. How very consonant is this, to the following passage in Mr. Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise; "if we establish by physical proofs, that the first fact which can be traced in the history of the world, is, that there was light,' we shall still be led, even by our natural reason, to suppose, that before this could occur, God said 'Let there be light,'" page 191.

1 Werner's System, see Bakewell, p. 216, 217.

FIRST FORMATIONS.

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Mr. Penn totally discards all ideas of a chaos, or confusion of elements, as derogatory to the majesty and omnipotence of God, conceiving it to be most natural, as well as most decorous, to conclude that if this planet were ordained to become at any given time, the habitation of man, whatever appearances the solid parts of the earth may now bear of chrystallization, precipitation, &c. they were called into being at once, as first formations, and entirely without the intervention of such secondary causes, as have been known to act since.

In both these cases, we have a beginning of things clearly assigned, and that in conformity to Scripture ; which is certainly not the case with other more fashionable theories. "The result therefore of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of beginning, no prospect of an end." (Theory of the Earth, &c. by James Hutton, M. D.) But surely the first and successive appearances of organic reliquiæ, were so many direct vestiges of a beginning as to that portion of the creation; and one beginning is, for our purposes, as good as a hundred'. I do not indeed wonder that Dr. Hutton could find no beginning, for if all the continents that have ever appeared (according to his system), should have owed their structure and contents to the destruction of former continents, I know not what the first destructible continents could have been, except indeed such a first formation production, as Mr. Penn has described; and then our own earth may as well be a first formation as any; for if not eternal, it must at one time or other have been just as old, as we account it to be now, and

1 See Buckland's Inaugural Lecture.