The field of the Geologist's inquiry is the Globe itself, ... [and] it is his study to decipher the monuments of the mighty revolutions and convulsions it has suffered.

Thus the great drama of universal life is perpetually sustained and though the individual actors undergo continual change, the same parts are ever filled by another and another generation renewing the face of the earth, and the bosom of the deep, with endless successions of life and happiness.

Geology has shared the fate of other infant sciences, in being for a while considered hostile to revealed religion so like them, when fully understood, it will be found a potent and consistent auxiliary to it, exalting our conviction of the Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator.

The successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry.

It is demonstrable from Geology that there was a period when no organic beings had existence: these organic beings must therefore have had a beginning subsequently to this period and where is that beginning to be found, but in the will and fiat of an intelligent and all-wise Creator?

No conclusion is more fully established, than the important fact of the total absence of any vestiges of the human species throughout the entire series of geological formations.

Shall it any longer be said that a science [geology], which unfolds such abundant evidence of the Being and Attributes of God, can reasonably be viewed in any other light than as the efficient Auxiliary and Handmaid of Religion?

Geology holds the keys of one of the kingdoms of nature and it cannot be said that a science which extends our Knowledge, and by consequence our Power, over a third part of nature, holds a low place among intellectual employments.

The days of the Mosaic creation are not to be strictly construed as implying the same length of time which is at present occupied by a single revolution of our globe, but PERIODS of a much longer extent.