different would it be in its characters from any of the secondary strata.
Its great features would undoubtedly be the works of man--hewn stones,
and statues of bronze and marble, and tools of iron--and human remains
would be more common than those of animals on the greatest part of the
surface; the columns of Paestum or of Agrigentum, or the immense iron and
granite bridges of the Thames, would offer a striking contrast to the
bones of the crocodiles or sauri in the older rocks, or even to those of
the mammoth or elephas primogenius in the diluvial strata. And whoever
dwells upon this subject must be convinced that the present order of
things, and the comparatively recent existence of man as the master of
the globe, is as certain as the destruction of a former and a different
order and the extinction of a number of living forms which have now no
types in being, and which have left their remains wonderful monuments of
the revolutions of Nature.

_Onu_.--I am not quite convinced by your arguments. Supposing the lands
of New Holland were to be washed into the depths of the ocean, and to be
raised according to the Huttonian view, as a secondary stratum, by
subterraneous fire, they would contain the remains of both vegetables and
animals entirely different from any found in the strata of the old
continents; and may not those peculiar formations to which you have
referred be, as it were, accidents of Nature belonging to peculiar parts
of the globe? And you speak of a diluvian formation, which I conclude
you would identify with that belonging to the catastrophe described in
the sacred writings, in which no human remains are found. Now, you
surely will not deny that man existed at the time of this catastrophe,
and he consequently may have existed at the period of the other
revolutions, which are supposed to be produced in the Huttonian views by
subterraneous fire.