Amb.—­We are very much obliged to you for your geological illustrations; but they remind me a little of some of the ideas of our friend Philalethes in his remarkable vision, and with which we may at some time amuse you in return for your geology should we be honoured with more of your company.  You are obliged to have recourse to creations for all the living beings in your philosophical romance.  I do not see why you should not suppose creations or arrangements of dead matter by the same laws of infinite wisdom, and why our globe should not rise at once a divine work fitted for all the objects of living and intelligent natures.

The stranger replied:  “I have merely attempted a philosophical history founded upon the facts known respecting rocks and strata and the remains they contain.  I begin with what may be considered a creation, a fluid globe supplied with an immense atmosphere, and the series of phenomena which I imagine consequent to the creation, I supposed produced by powers impressed upon matter by Omnipotence.”

Ambrosio said:  “There is this verisimility in your history, that it is not contradictory to the little we are informed by Revelation as to the origin of the globe, the order produced in the chaotic state, and the succession of living forms generated in the days of creation, which may be what philosophers call the ‘epochas of nature,’ for a day with Omnipotence is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

“I must object,” Onuphrio said, “to your interpretation of the scientific view of our new acquaintance, and to your disposition to blend them with the cosmogony of Moses.  Allowing the divine origin of the Book of Genesis, you must admit that it was not intended to teach the Jews systems of philosophy, but the laws of life and morals; and a great man and an exalted Christian raised his voice two centuries ago against this mode of applying and of often wresting the sense of the Scriptures to make them conformable to human fancies; ‘from which,’ says Lord Bacon, ’arise not only false and fantastical philosophies, but likewise heretical religions.’  If the Scriptures are to be literally interpreted and systems of science found in them, Gallileo Gallilei merited his persecution, and we ought still to believe that the sun turns round the earth.”

Amb.—­You mistake my view, Onuphrio, if you imagine I am desirous of raising a system of geology on the Book of Genesis.  It cannot be doubted that the first man was created with a great variety of instinctive or inspired knowledge, which must have been likewise enjoyed by his descendants; and some of this knowledge could hardly fail to have related to the globe which he inhabited, and to the objects which surrounded him.  It would have been impossible for the human mind to have embraced the mysteries of creation, or to have followed the history of the moving atoms from their chaotic disorder into their arrangement in the visible universe, to have