Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/57

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It may be said we have no right to deny the possible existence of life and organization upon the surface, or in the interior of our planet, under a state of igneous fusion, "Who," says the ingenious and speculative Tucker, (Light of Nature, book iii. chap. 10), "can reckon up all the varieties that infinite wisdom can contrive, or show the impossibility of organizations dissimilar to any within our experience? Who knows what cavities lie within the earth, or what living creatures they may contain, endued with senses unknown to us, to whom the streams of magnetism may serve instead of light, and those of electricity affect them as sensibly as sounds and odours affect us? Why should we pronounce it impossible that there should be bodies formed to endure the burning sun, to whom fire maybe the natural element, whose bones and muscles are composed of fixed earth, their blood and juices of molten metals? Or others made to live in the frozen regions of Saturn, having their circulation carried on by fluids more subtle than the highest rectified spirits raised by chemistry?"

It is not for us to meet questions of this kind by dogmatising as to possible existences, or to presume to speculate on the bounds which creative Power may have been pleased to impose on its own operations. We can only assert, that as the laws that now regulate the movements and properties of all the material elements, can be shown to have undergone no change since matter was first created upon our planet; no forms of organization such as now exist, or such as Geology shows to have existed, during any stages of the gradual formation of the earth, could have supported, for an instant, the state of, fusion here supposed.

We therefore conclude, that whatever beings of wholly