They were a timid, gentle race, but ignorant, and heathenish worshipers of unknown gods.
The expedition detailed a great detachment of missionaries to teach them the true religion, and in a week's time a precious work had been wrought among those darkened creatures, not three families being by that time at peace with each other or having a settled belief in any system of religion whatever.

This encouraged the expedition to establish a colony of missionaries there permanently, that the work of grace might go on.
But let us not outrun our narrative.

After close examination of the fronts of the caverns, and much thinking and exchanging of theories, the scientists determined the nature of these singular formations.

They said that each belonged mainly to the Old Red Sandstone period; that the cavern fronts rose in innumerable and wonderfully regular strata high in the air, each stratum about five frog-spans thick, and that in the present discovery lay an overpowering refutation of all received geology; for between every two layers of Old Red Sandstone reposed a thin layer of decomposed limestone; so instead of there having been but one Old Red Sandstone period there had certainly been not less than a hundred and seventy-five! And by the same token it was plain that there had also been a hundred and seventy-five floodings of the earth and depositings of limestone strata! The unavoidable deduction from which pair of facts was the overwhelming truth that the world, instead of being only two hundred thousand years old, was older by millions upon millions of years! And there was another curious thing: every stratum of Old Red Sandstone was pierced and divided at mathematically regular intervals by vertical strata of limestone.

Up-shootings of igneous rock through fractures in water formations were common; but here was the first instance where water-formed rock had been so projected.