It is an interesting thought, that will occur to a contemplative mind,
that the world contained, from the time when it was a nebulous mass, all
the materials of the future individuals of the animate and inanimate
creation,--that the elaborate creatures of the vegetable and animal
kingdoms, as well as every mineral, were floating in amorphous masses
through space. Human beings, like genius that was condensed from vapor
at the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp, were diffused in gases, waiting the
touch of the Great Magician's wand to bring them into form and infuse
them with life. In all the distinct creations of God, from the time
when the waters first subsided and the dry land appeared, in everything
organized and inorganized, earth, air, sea, and their inhabitants, there
is no element which was not in existence when the earth was without form
and void.

Philosophers tell us that three hundred and fifty millions of years
elapsed after the globe began to solidify, before it was fitted for the
lowest plants. And more than one million years more were necessary,
after the first plants began to grow upon its young surface, to bring it
forward to the condition which the Divine Father deemed suitable for the
reception of man. If the days of Cain and Abel were the infancy of the
world,--as we have sometimes heard,--when will it come to maturity? Its
divisions of life cannot follow the plan of animated beings; for, with
an embryonic condition of an indefinite period, and an infancy of three
hundred and fifty millions of years, more or less, we can hardly expect
that it will really have begun to enjoy the freedom of adult life,
before the human race will have attained to its earthly limit of
perfectibility, or have so overstocked the surface of the globe as to
make it necessary to remove to some larger sphere.