Let me first remark, that no one need expect to be original simply by being absurd. There is a cycle in nonsense, as certainly as in opinion of a more solid kind, which ever and anon brings back the delusions and errors of an earlier time: the follies of the present day are transcripts, unwittingly produced, and with of course a few variations, of follies which existed centuries ago; and it seems to be on this principle,--a consequence, mayhap, of the limited range of the human mind, not only in its elucidations of truth, but also in its forms of error,--that scarce an explanation of geologic phenomena has been given by the anti-geologists of our own times, that was not anticipated by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was held, for instance,--in opposition to the great painter, Leonardo da Vinci, who flourished early in the sixteenth century, and was one of the first who, after the revival of learning, asserted the true character of organic remains,--that fossils were formed in the rocks through the planetary influences, or a certain plastic force in nature, and had never entered into the composition of living creatures or plants. And this view obtained very generally till about the middle of the seventeenth century, when, save for a brief space long after, in the times of Voltaire, it ceased to be regarded as any longer tenable. Curiously enough, however, it was virtually reproduced by one of the extant anti-geologists,--a clergyman of the English Church,--only three years ago, in a publication written, he says, to counteract "the immense mischief occasioned by the infidel works of geologists, _especially among the lower classes_," and which he has termed "a brief and complete refutation" of their "anti-scriptural theory."[37] "Fossils," says this courageous writer, "were not necessarily animated structures:" some of them were in all probability "formed of stone from the very first;" others, of inanimate flesh and bone. "The mammoth found under the ice in arctic regions had not necessarily been a living creature: it was created under the ice, and then preserved in that peculiar form of preservation, instead of being transmuted into stone, like the rest of its class." Such was the state of keeping of this famous mammoth, when discovered a little ere the beginning of the present century, that, as I had occasion formerly to remark, dogs and bears fed upon its flesh; and its bones, and part of its skin, covered with long red hair, are now in the museum of Petersburg. But there is no evidence whatever, according to this writer, that it had ever been a living creature: it was simply a created carcass. All organisms are, he holds, models or archetypes, fashioned during the first day in the depths of chaos, to typify or foreshadow the living plants and animals that were to be called into existence a few days later. "What," he asks, "do the cocoa-nuts, melons, and gourds, which have been found in the strata, show, but that the vegetable had its perfect archetype in chaos as well as the animal?" Nay, further, the geologist has but got into the apartment in which the original architect stored up his plans and models,--many of them, however, rejected ones. For "though every animal is formed after his archetype," we find him saying, "the converse is not true, that every chaotic structure is represented by its living _facsimile_." But they typify, if not living organisms, much more important things,--"they represent," says our writer, "the land of the shadow of death;" and the strata containing them, which geologists have opened, are symbolical of the "gates of death." "The state of preservation in which most fossils are, instead of having mouldered away, foreshadows immortality. The gradation, too, from the organisms whose types are _said to be_ lost or destroyed, and confused in innumerable heaps, up to the perfect and complete specimen, is no fanciful representation of the resurrection; while the isolated bones and parts of skeletons which, though found far apart, as they were created, have been fitted together by the skill of the accomplished anatomist, give assurance of the fact that our scattered dust--our _membra disjecta_--shall come together at the sound of the last trump." And this is "geology on Scripture principles," soberly expounded by a man who respects facts, while he gives no place to fancy.