"Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of His way, Before His work of old. I was set up from everlasting, From the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no deeps, T was brought forth; When there were no fountains abounding in water. Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills, was I brought forth: While as yet He had not made the earth, Nor the plains, nor the higher part of the habitable world, When He gave the sea His decree, that her waters should not pass His limits; When He determined the foundations of the earth."
The dominion of heat has passed away; the excess of water has been precipitated from the atmosphere, and now covers the earth as a universal ocean. The crust has folded itself into long ridges, the bed of the waters has subsided into its place, and the sea for the first time begins to rave against the shores of the newly elevated land, while the rain, washing the bare surfaces of rocky ridges, carries its contribution of the slowly wasting rocks back into the waters whence they were raised, forming, with the material worn from the crust by the surf, the first oceanic sediments. Do we know any of these earliest aqueous beds, or are they all hidden from view beneath newer deposits, or have they been themselves worn away and destroyed by denuding agencies? Whether we know the earliest formed sediments is, and may always remain, uncertain; but we do know certain very ancient rocks which may be at least their immediate successors.
[Illustration: Fig. 6.--The Laurentian nucleus of the American continent.]