A Coin Imbedded in a Rock.
By C. W. S.
PEOPLE have heard and read of toads’ having been found imbedded in rock; but now comes another curiosity to be added to the list. Mr. John Adriance, of this city, has a Mexican coin dated 1710, which was taken from the center of a piece of rock found in the bottom of the Rio Grande. The gentleman who sent the coin to this city, with the particulars in connection with its discovery, lives at Laredo. Not having a specimen of the rock in which the coin was found imbedded, gentlemen connected with the Historical Society, who are interested in the matter, have sent to him for a specimen, in order that theories as to the time the coin found its way to the bed of the river may be deduced. The finder of the coin writes that the rock is very hard and almost transparent.—Galveston News. Had that Mexican coin been something else and not provided with a date, it is uncertain upon what imaginary period in the past some of our learned geologists would have fixed as the probable time when it became surrounded by that soft substance which in process of time became hard rock. But the date is there—1710. When the science of geology comes to be correctly understood, it will not be found to disagree with revelation. Physical changes are wrought so rapidly under certain conditions, and so slowly under others, that it is simply impossible to tell how long a rock, a stratum of earth, or a deposit in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, has been in forming, unless the precise conditions are known. This is out of the question; therefore, the guess-work of geologists is a very unsafe foundation on which to build theories that go back of the record of Moses.