of water, but of fire, which shall neither annihilate nor extinguish, but shall purify and beautify till the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. He would show them that this preliminary purifying was not merely what good men had asserted it to be, but it was even in accordance with the discoveries of modern science. The doctor next commented on the passage in Peter, the literal rendering of which was the "earth (illegible text) with fire." This fact, he said, was proved by geologists. In a conversation with Sir R. Murchison, he asked whether he was right in illustrating the passage by the statement the nearer the center of the earth was reached the more intense was the heat? Sir Roderick answered that if there was one fact established in geology, it was that of the existence of an intense internal heat beneath the crust of the earth. The Royal Society in London had made a calculation that the mean rate of temperature increased one degree of the thermometer at every 45 feet depth. At that rate, sixty miles below the surface of the earth everything would be in a state of intense fusion and incandescence. There were many points of evidence to show this. The Aberdeen granite was an illustration. It had assuredly passed out of a molten state, as was shown by its crystals and by the entire absence of fossils, which were only to be found in the upper strata. The probability was that the earth was a vast shell, full of the most terrible combustible materials. Sir David Brewster said that volcanoes were the Earth's safety valves; although but little thought of, it was a fact that they lived upon a crust of fossils with a core of internally burning fire. So true was that that Sir Charles Lyell, who was a man of authority in geological science, had said "When we consider the fusible nature of the elements of the earth and the facility with which its compounds may be decomposed, we might well be allowed to share the astonishment of Pliny, that a single day should pass without a universal conflagration".
Then he would ask, is the destruction of the Earth by the fire it contains internally to be expected according to prophecy? It seemed to him irresistible proved that the earth was to undergo a baptism of fire, but not by that baptism to be annihilated. Science would tell them there was no such thing as annihilation. The lecturer illustrated this by noticing the change of flax into a woven fabric, then into rag and paper, and next into smoke, but not one atom, he said was annihilated. The endless divisibility of matter was not felt by us, but were the eye sufficiently microscopic, even a small piece of wood might be seen to be divided endlessly. Hence it had be argued that a word spoken on earth never ceased, as its vibration circulated and spread through endless space. So philosopher Babbage had shown that by a touch of the ocean by an oar, the whole volume of the sea was disturbed. Trample on a blade of grass, and the vibration went through the whole earth. We did not hear it because our faculty of sound -
