We see, too, a period—­whether the same as this, or after it, I know not yet—­in which the mountains of Wales and Cumberland rose to the limits of eternal frost, and Snowdon was indeed Snowdon, an alp down whose valleys vast glaciers spread far and wide; while the reindeer of Lapland, the marmot of the Alps, and the musk ox of Hudson’s Bay, fed upon alpine plants, a few of whose descendants still survive, as tokens of the long past age of ice.  And at every successive upheaval of the western mountains the displaced waters of the ocean swept over the lower lands, filling the valley of the Thames and of the Wey with vast beds of drift gravel, containing among its chalk flints, fragments of stone from every rock between here and Wales, teeth of elephants, skulls of ox and musk ox; while icebergs, breaking away from the glaciers of the Welsh Alps, sailed down over the spot where we now are, dropping their imbedded stones and silt, to confuse more utterly than before the records of a world rocking and throbbing above the shocks of the nether fire.

At last the convulsions get weak.  The German Ocean becomes sea once more; the north-western Alps sink again to a level far lower even than their present one; only to rise again, but not so high as before; sea-beaches and sea-shells fill many of our lower valleys; whales by hundreds are stranded (as in the Farnham vale) where is now dry land.  Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more gently each time, till as it were the panting earth, worn out with the fierce passions of her fiery youth, has sobbed herself to sleep once more, and this new world of man is made.  And among it, I know not when, or by what diluvial wave out of hundreds which swept the Pleistocene earth, was deposited our little gravel-pit, from which we started on our journey through three worlds.

When?

Enough for us that He knows when, in whose hand are the times and the seasons—­God the Father of the spirits of all flesh.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, take from hence a lesson.  I have brought you a long and a strange road.  Starting from this seemingly uninteresting pit, we have come upon the records of three older worlds, and on hints of worlds far older yet.  We have come to them by no theories, no dreams of the fancy, but by plain honest reasoning, from plain honest facts.  That wonderful things had happened, we could see:  but why they had happened, we saw not.  When we began to ask the reason of this thing or of that, remember how we had to stop, and laying our hands upon our mouths, only say with the Mussulman:  “God is great.”  We pick our steps, by lanthorn light indeed, and slowly, but still surely and safely, along a dark and difficult road:  but just as we are beginning to pride ourselves on having found our way so cleverly, we come to an edge of darkness; and see before our feet a bottomless abyss, down which our feeble lanthorn will not throw its light a yard.