maintaining a constant skirmish with cavillers and sophists; whose policy it is, to challenge a perpetual warfare on the road, in order that it may not be travelled to the END. By yielding ourselves to that stratagem, we contribute in effect to promote one great end of infidelity. Whereas, if we will only resolutely set forward, and pursue our progress uninterruptedly under the safeguard of a sound and powerful principle, we may set all adversaries at defiance; and, by pressing on to the utmost extent to which that principle will lead us, we shall at length arrive at the term from which it was the design of the adversary to preclude us. It is a weak system of tactics, which, in an enterprise of great moment, would stop to engage with every hovering band that attempts to harass the march; whilst, at the same time, there exists a consciousness of force sufficient to accomplish the enterprise in spite of all opposition. To those among the opponents who cherish a general regard for truth, and many such there are, the manifestation of the Sacred Truth which we shall have gained in their despite, will operate with advantage; and they themselves will thus become benefited, by the resolution with which their arms shall have been slighted and their opposition disregarded. With respect to all other opponents; as we cannot entertain an hope of serving them by our success, so neither shall we suffer ourselves to be interrupted by their opposition: obturatá aure transibimus. INTRODUCTION то THE PRESENT EDITION. SHORTLY after the publication of the first Edition of the Comparative Estimate, several very important works on Geology appeared in quick succession before the world; viz. The first Volume of the Geology of England and Wales, with the Introduction of the Rev. W. D. CONY BEARE. Mr. Professor BUCKLAND'S Reliquiæ Diluviana. M. CUVIER's Ossemens Fossiles. New Edition. The Translation of M. HUMBOLDT'S Geognostical Essay on the Superposition of Rocks in both Hemispheres. The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews of the Reliquia Diluviana. To these may be added, the Geological Disquisition introduced by the Rev. G. S. FABER into his Treatise on the Three Dispensations. Also, the reviews of this present Work, in the Eclectic Review, in the Journal of Science, and lastly, in the British Critic. The important matters which the former of those works contained, could not therefore have been noticed in the first edition of this treatise; and consequently, in revising and preparing it for a second edition, it became necessary to dissolve and recast the whole, in order to bring it into immediate relation and contact with each of those several publications. In the progress of that operation, I found it expedient to develope more extensively many particular passages of my argument, and to subjoin to the work some dissertatory Notes; by which various modes of augmentation, notwithstanding the curtailment of several redundancies, the treatise has unavoidably grown from one into two volumes. I am very far from regretting this circumstance; it has enabled me to form a more secure judgment of the quality of the argument which I at first undertook to maintain, and it has rendered less intricate, the course which I have now to pursue in order to demonstrate and establish its solidity. I have found no cause whatever, for mistrusting the line of reasoning which I employed in the first instance; and I am now to shew, that it is in no manner impaired by any thing which has been brought forward in any of those later works, but that, on the contrary, it derives the strongest and most effectual collateral support from all and each of them. This will be made thoroughly to appear, in the progress of the subject; either by extensions of the text, or by marginal notes, according as the particular occasion may be found to require. With respect to the Notes annexed to each volume, in the form of an Appendix : To the First Volume are subjoined ; Note I. On the Mosaic Days of Creation. II. On the Jubilean Chronology of FRANK. |