There seems to be no strong reason for doubting that every elementary substance of which we have any knowledge was separated at the first from that crude mass called “the earth,” and which, along with “the heaven,” God created in the beginning.

For, after that first assertion, we read of continued acts of “separation” by an Almighty fiat. Thus light is separated from darkness; waters from waters; water from earth. And by a like analogy we may suppose that the “firmament” or atmosphere, the lower part of which we breathe, was also eliminated in its component gases from the primitive shapeless bulk of matter.

If we take forty-five miles as the average height of this atmosphere above the surface of our globe, it is proportionately, like the thin rind upon an apple, or the bloom upon a peach; and may very well have come forth without any violence done to nature, or any waste of her resources, from the womb of the earth.

OXYGEN is a gas universally diffused, for without a large supply of it human beings and all the mammals, birds, and reptiles, would die. But oxygen is not a more simple element than CARBON or SILICON; and silicon is almost as universal, for it enters largely into the composition of all known rocks, excepting coal, limestone, and rock-salt.

Then, beside silicon and carbon, there is BORON, and many others, all of which will combine permanently with the principal gases, and which we may, therefore, fairly suppose did so in the beginning.

The oxygen which we breathe enters into composition with almost all known substances. It constitutes about one-fifth of the atmosphere, perhaps eight-ninths of the water, and helps chemically to compound all forms of earth and rock, and all the metals save five. Now this proclaims at once a kindred element, and does not look like a substance made independent of all the others at the first. Even potash and soda, which were long called “fixed alkalis,” having resisted all attempts to decompose them, yielded at last to a galvanic process, and were found to be compound; oxygen, in both cases, having united itself intimately with a metallic base.

It is probable, therefore, that every substance which we can handle, or of which we can recognize the presence by a chemical test, was as truly a part of the chaotic Earth as was the clay or the granite. The gaseous atmosphere or “firmament” was eliminated by an act of creation from the torpid mass, the waters were drawn off and gathered together, the rocks consolidated, the metals precipitated, most of the crystals were probably perfected by galvanic operations. But there is nothing, from the crystallized blocks of the mountains to the salt held in solution in the sea, from the heavy rain-cloud which darkens the sky to the gossamer films of vapour which fringe the outermost edge of our atmosphere, which was not actually present as an existing particle when the Earth, “Mother-Earth,” was made. And the EARTH, as we see, could very well furnish all these concomitant and subsidiary elements, without being impoverished at all. Indeed, as far as experiments and investigations proper have gone, we have as yet only touched the surface of our globe. The deepest mine which men have ever sunk into the bowels of the earth bears in its depth the same proportion to the earth’s radius, as a line, or one-eighth of an inch, bears to the height of the monument at London Bridge. Some of the exposed strata of rock, allowing for the tilting-up of their edges, certainly reveal a deeper sample than this; but still, it is like the prick of a pin on the hide of a rhinoceros; it does not even penetrate the creature’s folded hide; but of what lies within it tells us nothing.

Mr. Baily’s successful attempt at “weighing the Earth,” which, with consummate patience and skill, he brought to a termination in his house in Tavistock Square, has established the physical fact that this planet is not “a hollow sphere,” as some persons had supposed, but solid, probably to its very centre, and of considerable specific gravity. Here is a mighty mass of Matter; it may be, as Dr. Whewell has argued, the greatest mass (in solid contents) in our Solar system. What do we know of its interior construction, economy, and arrangement? Nothing, except that all obey the laws established by the Creator, whether those of gravitation, cohesive attraction, or chemical combination. The “statistical report” is wanting, especially in such departments as those of the Trap and Volcanic lavas.

The amount of SALT in the ocean is a circumstance which geologists have not, I think, sufficiently considered. This salt, if precipitated, would, it is believed, yield a solid range of mountains equal to that of the entire Himalaya. Now, mighty rivers run into the sea, as those of La Plata, Amazons, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Orinoko, and many others; but none of these rivers are salt; they are enormous bodies of fresh water. How, then, does the ocean maintain everywhere its saline character unimpaired? not to ask, whence did so much salt come? There is, indeed, a hill of salt in Spain, and there are mines of rock-salt in Poland and Hungary; but the effort which was made, so to speak, when the proportion now existing in the ocean was squeezed out of the huge terrestrial sponge, must far have exceeded that of any subsequent addition or contribution.

The ocean itself, as girding this globe, is a prodigious mass of water, indeed. But, if we remember the size of the globe itself, as given by its diameter, Ocean appears like a rain-pond. For, if we call its average depth five miles—and it cannot be more than this, may be much less—such a watery envelope would be represented in its proportion to the solid sphere which it surrounds, by a coating of varnish of the thickness of this paper lying on a globe which is twenty feet in diameter.

The COAL-MEASURES are also a remarkable item in the list of substances met with in beds and ranges, and claiming to be considered as rocks—for the coal is a petrifaction, perhaps a partial crystallization—but due to the deposition of vegetable matter, subjected afterwards to enormous hydrostatic pressure. We have no true estimate of their amount as yet, for fresh mines are being continually discovered; but here seems to consist the chief proportion of CARBON, as developed in this part of the visible creation.

CHALK constitutes one-eighth part of the crust of this globe. The mass of this must have been thrown up at once, when the atmosphere was eliminated, and the waters separated, and the sphere became condensed and solid. It is a “carbonate of lime” in its chemical description, and there is abundance of the limestone-rock all over the world; but it is very difficult to extract from this, in any quantity, the soft, friable, slightly unctuous mineral which goes by the name of chalk (Latin, “calx”).

The METALS exist in the rocks, generally some distance down in the earth’s interior. Their amount, in some instances, is very great indeed. The only one which is rarely met with on our globe, and then in small grains, is the NATIVE IRON, i.e. iron in its pure state. This want, however, could not have been recognized if we had not happened to find the substance in question in those blocks of meteoric iron, and in the small meteoric stones which have, from time to time, fallen to the surface of the earth during atmospheric storms, and, probably, owing to astronomical disturbances. For, of the iron, in its mixed conditions of different ores, we have an abundant supply. It is a singular fact, that the native gold, both in pure grains or flakes, and in solid “nuggets,” appears now to be the more prevalent form of that ponderous and imperishable substance. The ranges of quartz-rock in many chains of mountains are certainly thickly sown with seeds and nodules of fine gold.

I may mention here, as an interesting circumstance to mineralogists and collectors of fossil pebbles, that the “native iron,” which is so scarce on the surface of the ground, is met with, from time to time, along with manganese, in the heart of siliceous pebbles. But I have never seen it where there is not the presence of some animal organism.

Now all these solids, gold, iron, chalk, coal, salt—and I select incongruous items on purpose—are as truly portions of the earth’s mass as are the granite and slate, the sandstones and clays. And so are also the flowing waters and the suspended clouds; and so are also the component elements of these—oxygen, hydrogen, and the rest. It is, all of it, MATTER; it all obeys the law of gravitation, and it needs just as much to be taken into account, in a geological scheme or system, as the upheaving of granite rocks, the flux of lavas, or the icthyolite beds amidst the semi-crystalline ranges of the Old Red Sandstone formation.

Consequently I have found, as has partly I trust been shown in the preceding pages, that even to handle and pronounce upon a pebble, such an one as we can pick up on the sea-shore any summer’s day, all these elements must be taken into the account.

In a “moss-agate,” for instance, I discover—

First. A sandy cuticle, which we will rub off, as it is like the dust on your drawing-room table, a real thing, but out of place.

Secondly. Siliceous matter.

Thirdly. A purer form of this in chalcedony.

Fourthly. The “moss,” which is a metal proper, tinged by oxidation. [N.B. Here is oxygen inside a pebble!]

Fifthly. The whole or a part of some extinct animal’s petrified structure.

Sixthly. One thing more, sometimes a drop of water.

Seventhly and lastly. Air, permeating the stone in fine pores and channels, one of the largest of which was in some cases a breathing-hole used by the zoophyte before he drew his last gasp.

Who shall therefore say that a PEBBLE from the sea-shore has nothing remarkable in it or about it, merely because the passing schoolboy can pick it up if he pleases, and, without looking at it for a moment, can fling it at the head of a gull, or dash it to atoms against a larger stone? It is a microcosm in itself; and if it lead us on to further inquiry and patient thought, it will amply repay our trouble, though we have loitered away a summer morn or an autumn evening among the Pebbles of the Beach.