GEIKIE ON " GEOLOGICAL TIME."

Mr. Geikie, who was, received with applause, commenced his lecture as follows:—

"Among the causes which have retarded and even yet retard, the progress of geology, none have exercised a more pernicious influence than the popular misconceptions and prejudices regarding the past history of our planet.  Though the idea that the world is only some 5000 years old has been abandoned even by theological writers of the most orthodox school, the influence of that widespread belief has by no means passed away. Nor need this be in any degree a matter of surprise; for, apart from the effect of all traditional teaching on the subject it is but natural to contemplate the earth in its unity, as the result of one creative act, rather than as the harmonious issue of many varied and long-continued  processes. Varieties of outline in mountain and valley, hill and plain, and even sometimes the corresponding diversities in the nature of the rooks underneath, form the subject of familiar remark ; but they do not naturally suggest the vastness of the earth's contiguity—still less, the widely different ages of contiguous parts of the earth's surface.  These are ideas which it requires more than a cursory observation to master. Nor until after long and patient study do we come in some measure to realise the wonderfully complex character of the crust of our globe, and the immensity of the periods which it records. So long as we labour under false conceptions in this matter, our advance in geology can be neither rapid nor sure. When, therefore the Council of your Society, a short while ago, asked me to address you on some geological subject, it occurred to me that perhaps no topic would be more likely at once to interest you and to offer suggestions that might be helpful in the practical pursuit of geological studies.
 I propose this evening to speak to you, of geological time ; not with the view of saying anything new, or of laying before you more than a mere outline of a portion of this great question, but with the wish to press very earnestly upon your attention certain principles which cannot be too  vividly or too constantly remembered. To many men unacquainted with the methods of geological research, there doubtless, appears to be much that is conjectural, if not incredible, in the statements of geologists as to the different relative ages of various portions of the earth's crust. The apparent confidence with which one mountain is pronounced to be older than another wakens in their mind first a feeling of wonder which in the end not improbably shades into one of vague doubt. And when they hear it asserted not merely that the hills differ from each other in age, but that, one part of a hill may be of widely different antiquity from the rest of it, and even that the base of a mountain may sometimes be greatly younger than the top, their incredulity is apt to grow, into strong disbelief. It was under the influence of such convictions that Cowper penned his contemptuous notice of the geologists of his time. And notwithstanding the amazing progress of science since his day, and the wide spread of knowledge through all classes of society, the old popular prejudices on this subject, though soundly shaken, are very far from being removed. People admit in words the deductions of science, and yet, partly from the strength of early association, and partly from the irksomeness of mastering the methods by which these deductions are reached, they are frequently found to think and argue with their old prejudices in full force.
     My main object this evening is to narrate, as clearly and briefly as I can, the nature of the evidence which is thus ignored, and to indicate, by examples more or less familiar to all, the manner, in which that evidence is brought to bear upon the question of geological time. At the outset we are met with certain preliminary objections. It is alleged that the past history of the planet has beet one of convulsion and cataclysm ; that the present order of nature is the quiescent result of much turmoil ; that the energy of the universe having been decreasing all geological operations must have been carried on upon a greater scale than now — and hence that no safe generalisation can be drawn from the existing economy of nature to those who have preceded it. Into some of those questions it would be wholly out of place to enter this evening. I choose a line of argument which precludes cataclysms; and in which we have to deal with phenomena where the lapse of time can be relatively measured. With regard to what are called uniformitarian views in geology, though it is quite possible that in some respects they may have been carried too far, yet I believe that a thoughtful survey of the geological records, more especially with reference to the history of life, and the relation between life and the physical revolutions of the earth's surface, leads naturally and irresistibly to the conclusion that though the geological agencies may have varied in their energy in past time, nevertheless there is no evidence to indicate that, on the whole, they have materially differed from their present rate during the periods of which geology interprets the memorials. It is safer therefore, to proceed on a basis of ascertained fact and experience than upon what at best might be only plausible speculation.
By such a course there is found to be an admirable harmony between the world of to-day and the relics of earlier worlds buried in the rocks. The present becomes the true key to the past, while the past in turn explains much that would otherwise be hard to understand in the present." Mr. Geikie then proceeded to speak of the geological evidence of the earth's antiquity under three heads ; 1. "Inorganic evidence ;  Organic evidence ; and The bearing of astronomical and physical data upon the question.
Under the first of these divisions he noticed the fact that the whole surface of the earth from the mountain top to the sea shore was slowly changing and undergoing a  process of waste. The atmosphere acting upon the rocks disintegrated them, and the detritus was then washed down by the rain into the rivers and the sea. If they considered the great circulation of water upon the globe they would find that it made the greatest changes of any of the agents recognised by geology. The process of waste, however was slow; as scarcely to be appreciable in a man's lifetime. Besides the changes effected by water there was the action of icebergs and glaciers, which acted mechanically in grinding the rocks to sand and mud. The lecturer illustrated this portion of his lecture by reference to well drawn pictures of the glacier-fields of Norway, and remarked that in every Scottish glen they found that the rocks had been ground down in the same way as they were being planed away in Norway, and how vast must have been the time taken in the process. Representations of sandstone rocks standing upon the Laurentian gneiss in Sutherland and Ross shires were pointed to as illustrating the gradual manner in which the former had been worn and proving that there had not been any sudden convulsion or cataclysm in producing the geologic changes alluded to.
 Coming to the organic evidence of the changes, the lecturer referred to the occurrence of a Germanic Flora in this country as a proof that the temperature was much more moderate in this country now than it had been in former eras. Plants that formerly bloomed in our valleys had now become alpine in their character and were only to be found on, the tops of the hills. In regard to the Fauna shells that had lived during the glacial period were still to be found in our seas, and only a few species had become extinct. As the plants had become inhabitants of hill tops, so these shells of a former age had become denizens of the deeper parts of the sea. All these changes had been effected since the glacial period, and when they knew, as they did, the length of time that had elapsed since then, how long must have been the time since the plants and animals of former periods were extinguished !
 In regard to the bearing of astronomical and physical data upon the question, Mr. Geikie remarked that the geological record afforded no data for computing the length of its periods in years. If, however, it contained traces of any great cosmical event it might be possible to arrive at the date of such an event, for the astronomical periods were not like those of geology, but could be computed in years. It had long been the belief of many geologists that if any actual data of this kind were to be found, it must be by the labours of the astronomer, rather than of the geologist. An attempt had recently been made by Mr. James Croll, Glasgow, to connect in this way the two sciences, and his paper deserved careful study.  Taking the glacial period as his starting point, Mr Croll proposed to explain the recurrence of cold periods in the earth's history by the combination of the procession of the Equinoxes with the slow secular variations in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit. Reasoning upon this, he demonstrated that the nearest period to which the glacial period could be assigned was about 800,000 years' ago. Comparatively speaking, the change produced on the earth's crust in that time had been very small indeed, and as most of the shells living then were living still, how enormous must have been the time required to extinguish the numerous extinct races. If they thus got a beginning, they might yet be able to form an approximate value for the other periods : but geologists were just groping their way, and what was stated must be taken with caution, as they desired rather to illustrate the truth than state dogmas. (Hear,)
 " In conclusion, if the subject has been placed in a clear light, this evening, it will, I trust, be apparent how vast must be the antiquity of our globe, and how varied, but firm, is the evidence on which the belief in that antiquity rests. There is no doctrine in geology more important than this, and none, perhaps, which it is more difficult duly to appreciate, and acknowledge. It runs counter to old beliefs and prejudices, which as I have said, are apt to show their lingering influence, even after we admit them to be wrong. As geologists, we are apt to err rather by underrating than by overrating the value of time in the past history of the globe. We should lose no opportunity, therefore, of bringing before our minds such facts and just inferences as may tend to quicken our perceptions in this matter. Not that any magic influence is to be attributed to the lapse of time as in itself a geological agent ; but that only with the belief in vastly protracted periods can the changes which are chronicled in the rocks be understood, and the history of the ancient world be brought into harmony with the economy of this world around us. In all such questions as the history of life upon the globe and the antiquity of living species, including, of course, man, the element of time plays so important a part that it must be made itself a subject of study if these questions are to be intelligently discussed. But it is almost vain to hope that this will be often done save by geologists themselves. Hence the deductions of geologists are tacitly accepted by one section of the community, and ridiculed by another.
 The old warfare against our science, after slumbering for a while, has of late years been revived, and seems to be increasing in activity. Within the last few days we have seen two eminent members of the legal faculty enter the lists, and denounce modern science and its tendencies after a fashion which is sufficiently familiar, as used by our old clerical opponents, but which is not common with laymen, and especially with lawyers. (Laughter and applause.) One of these gentlemen tells us that he addresses himself to the subject 'in the mere spirit of a lawyer,' that he has 'no pretensions to scientific knowledge,' that he 'would not presume to contradict Mr. Darwin or Sir Charles Lyell on a matter of science ; he would not even presume to judge of it,' ' But,' he goes on to add, 'I can tell whether the facts which they have proved lead to the result which other people say they lead to; for when they come to that they descend from their eminence into the ordinary arena of hard logic' (A laugh.) Perhaps, like myself, you have amused yourself in endeavouring  to conjecture what this gentleman's conception of science can possibly be. I have always been in the habit of believing that the great aim of science is to establish principles, and that the mere hoarding of facts is a pursuit comparatively worthless, if it does not lead up to the perception of great truths. (Applause.) But this it seems is a mistaken belief. We now learn that the special function of science is to gather facts ; that the persons so engaged are placed on an eminence from which they must descend when they wish to put the facts together, and understand their bearings. A man who protests his ignorance of scientific knowledge, claims to decide upon the results of scientific inquiry. He does 'not presume to judge' or understand the facts, but he has no hesitation in asserting his competence to pronounce what conclusion may or may not be drawn from them, because they are then brought down into 'the ordinary arena of hard logic.' (Applause.) And the 'hard logic' which he uses is found to be only the old argumentum ad hominem, of which, in scientific questions at least it had been hoped that people were now getting ashamed. This speaker said most truly that he had addressed himself to these topics 'in the mere spirit of a lawyer.' Let us hope that, if he returns to them, it will be in another and better spirit (Loud applause.)
 This is only a sample of the kind of opposition which is offered. We are held up as scoffers, sceptics, infidels, and atheists, who do not openly avow their designs but seek insidiously to undermine the religious faith of the country ; we are taunted with the credulity of unbelief, and ridiculed as groping and burrowing philosophers, who say the one day what they unsay the next—men who, rather than believe in Scripture, "with strange credulity accept without evidence theories the most wild, irrational, and incredible"—men whose great aim seems to be to liberate mankind from the thrall of Christianity. I wish it were possible for those who use such language to know how profoundly they are mistaken. (Applause.)
The opinions which, as geologists, we hold regarding such questions as the antiquity of man have not been lightly taken up ; they have been forced upon us, in spite of old convictions, by the irresistible march of discovery, and have been or are now being formed in a manner against our will. If these opinions are sometimes opposed to long-established beliefs, we cannot help it. The truth is not of our making ; we cannot conceal it, and we dare not if we could. (Applause.) I have, indeed, no sympathy with men who obtrude  their obnoxious scientific doctrines when no other result is likely to follow than the irritating of the feelings and the wounding of the consciences of their fellow-men. There is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak out. As little can I sympathise with men who, having often but a slender stock of knowledge, seek to persuade the people that between the findings of science and orthodox biblical teaching there is no discrepancy ; who try to smother up difficulties, and cry peace, peace, when there is no peace. There can be no peace until the attempt is relinquished to crush the spirit of inquiry into an old and narrow mould. Our opponents assure us that they court the fullest investigation, and would give the freest scope for research. But what is the worth of this liberty when in the next breath they proceed to set bounds beyond which it cannot go? (Applause.) What becomes of the proffered freedom when they tell us that how far soever we may range in the search for truth, we must come back and square our results with the dogmas which are prescribed to us. (Applause.) We may go on collecting facts ; but when we study them, and presume to reason upon them, then it seems we go beyond our province, we 'descend from our eminence into the ordinary arena of hard logic;' we must submit our deductions to the decision of men who ostentatiously boast of their ignorance of the whole question, and who order us to stand till we are hooted and ridiculed before the world. (Applause.)
 As to the charge of insinuation that we use our scientific researches as a cloak for undermining the religious faith of the country. I take too much notice of it when I repel it with indignant scorn. (Applause.) Because, as geologists, we love to ponder over the past history of the planet of which we dwell, are we, therefore, to cease to have an interest with our fellow-men in our common Christianity? (Applause ) Had the men who thus speak of us lived a few centuries ago, they would have been found zealous defenders of Biblical astronomy ; but astronomy is now happily safe from them. They accept the deductions of that science implicitly, using them as arguments in favour of our religious belief, and proclaiming with triumph that 'the undevout astronomer is mad.' So, too, will it one day fare with geology. (Applause.) The men who now malign it will pass away, with all their littleness, and intolerance ; a new race will arise, finding in geology and its kindred agencies some of the firmest supports of true religion ; and Christianity, instead of being underminded and destroyed, will flourish still, as, after all, the best and greatest power on earth to elevate our race, to minister to its sufferings, and to point it onward and upward
   'To where beyond those voices there is peace."

--Edinburgh Daily Review, January 18.


Empire 9 April 1867

DR. BUCKLAND'S TREATISE ON GEOLOGY.

—A writer in the Tasmanian, has repeatedly referred to some false conclusions drawn by himself from the above work, with an air of triumph which, for his own sake, is sincerely to be regretted, as it betokens that dangerous error to which superficial minds are subject, of indulging scepticism on questions which have puzzled the human intellect, and drawn forth opposite and inconsistent theories, although these questions were already settled by the fiat of Him who cannot err. This writer alludes to the statement afforded by Dr. Buckland of the opinions of philosophers, respecting the origin and antiquity of our globe, and to the deduction from their contradictory character, that the question is one beyond the grasp of mind ; as if this overthrew the Mosaic account, which does not depend on the researches of man, but is founded on the revelation of heaven. The illegitimacy of this deduction must be obvious to a child, and needs no further answer. We append some of these contradictory and absurd theories : They are fitted to amuse, and also to give pain—pain that the human mind should so arrogantly contemn the information of heaven on questions beyond its reach, and expose itself to an abyss of folly and darkness in its vain and ineffectual competition with higher light. The practical reflection to be drawn is that of humility in the contemplation of our own powers, and confidence in the announcements of Heaven.

' The earth,' says Burnet, ' was first invested with an uniform light crust, which covered the abyss of the sea, and which being broken up for the production of the deluge, formed the mountains by its fragments.'—Theoria Sacra.

' The deluge,' says Woodward, ' was occasioned by a momentary suspension of cohesion among the particles of mineral bodies. The whole of the globe was dissolved, and the paste thus formed became penetrated with shells.'— Essay.

' God raised up,'says Schenckzer, 'the mountains, for the purpose of allowing the waters which had produced the deluge to run off, and selected those places in which were the greatest quantity of rocks, without which the mountains could not have supported themselves.'-Mem. de l' Academ.

The earth was formed from the atmosphere of one comet, and deluged by the train of another. The heat which it retained from its origin was the cause of exciting its inhabitants to sin, for which they were all drowned, excepting the fishes, which, having been fortunately exempt from the heat, remained innocent.'—Whiston, New Theory.

' The earth is an extinguished sun, a vitrified globe, on which the vapours falling down again, after it had cooled, formed seas, which afterwards deposited the limestone formations.'—Leibnitz Protogæa.

' The whole globe was covered with water many thousand years. The water gradually retired. All the land animals were originally inhabitants of the sea. Man was originally a fish ; and there are still fish to be met with in the ocean which are half men, on their progress to the perfect human shape, and whose descend- ants will in process of time men '—Demaillet.

The earth was a fragment of the sun, struck off red hot by the blow of a comet, together with all the other planets, which were also red hot fragments. The age of the world, then, can be calculated from the number of years which it would take to cool so large a mass from a red hot down to its present temperature. But it is of course growing colder every year, and, as well as the other planets, must finally be a globe of ice.' —Buffon Theorie.

' All things were originally fluid. The waters gave birth to microscopic insects ; the insects, in the course of ages, magnified themselves into the larger animals ; the animals, in the course of ages, converted a portion of the water into calcarious earth ; the vegetables converted another portion into clay! These two substances, in the course of ages, converted themselves into silex ; and thus the siliceous mountains are the oldest of all. All the solid parts of the earth, therefore, owe their existence to life, and without life, the globe would still be entirely liquid.'—Lamark. This, too, is the favorite mode among the German philosophers ! of accounting for the formation and filling of the world.

' The earth is a great animal ; it is alive ; a vital fluid circulates in it ; every particle of it is alive ; it has instinct and volition, even to the most elementary molecules, which attract and repel each other according to sympathies and antipathies. Every mineral has the power of converting immense masses into its own nature, as we convert food into flesh and blood. The mountains are the respiratory organs of the globe ! The schists are the organs of secretion ; the mineral veins are abscesses ; and the metals are products of disease, for which reason, most of them have a repulsive smell.'—Patrin. Dict. d' Histoire Naturelle.


' All is done by polarization.'—Oken.

Hobart Town Courier 26 May 1837

TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS.

REVIEW.

 (From the Examiner, March 28.)

The Testimony of the Rocks : or, Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies Natural and Revealed. By HUGH MILLER. Author of " The Old Red Sandstone," &c. Edinburgh : Shepherd and Elliot.

To this volume there is attached an adventitious interest, arising from the manner of its author's death within but a few hours after the last proofs were corrected. Its several chapters, except two which are entirely new, have been read as papers or lectures at sundry times and in sundry places, but they are so arranged as to pursue in a coherent way one subject of discussion, namely, the bearings of geology ; on our interpretation of the Scriptures. Mr. Miller, as it is well known, had raised himself from a very humble position in society to a high place in the esteem of educated people throughout Europe, not only by his love of science, but at the same time by the genius very often displayed in his writing. He could put life into his old fossils when he brought them to the light of day and made us friends with them. He was a religious man, whose tendency, it would have been, had not his mind been very diligently cultivated, to animate for himself extinct forms of theology. His closing years were indeed much occupied with the editing of a Scotch newspaper with strict religious views. In his early writing Mr. Miller was content with the six days of twenty-four hours each for the work of creation which satisfied the minds of Chalmers and of Buckland. Upon this he says, in a preface to the present volume— 

My labours at the time as a practical geologist had been very much restricted to the Paleozoic and secondary rocks, more especially to the old red and carboniferous systems of the one division, and the Oolitic system of the other; and the long extinct organisms which I found in them certainly did not conflict with the view of Chalmers. All I found necessary at the time to the work of reconciliation was some scheme that would permit me to assign to the earth a high antiquity; and to regard it as the scene of many succeeding creations. During the last nine years, however, I have spent a few weeks every autumn in exploring the later formations, and acquainting myself with their peculiar organisms. I have traced them upwards from the raised benches and old coast lines of the human period, to the brick clays, Clyde beds, and drift and boulder deposits of the Pleistocene era, and again from these, with the help of museums and collections, up through the mammaliferous crag of England, to its red and its coral crags. And the conclusion at which I have been compelled to arrive is,—

—in exact accordance with that of our most philosophical geologists. That is, indeed, the interesting fact connected with this final work of Mr. Miller's. A writer whom the most strait-laced theologian cannot accuse of irreverence, who has been pious even as Glasgow would interpret piety, and who never has for an instant thought of setting reason above revelation, sums up his experience by rebuke of the bigotry that finds antagonism between science and religion, declares that we must accept the Mosaic days as periods, must expect no scientific revelations in the Bible, must receive without fear the proved facts of geology, must admit, for instance, the belief that the whole earth has not at any time since man was made been covered by an universal deluge. The purpose of the book is to show that geology tends no more than astronomy has tended to the overthrow of a just faith in natural and revealed religion.

The volume contains twelve lectures. Of these the first explains in a popular way the Palæontology of Plants. The vegetation of the earliest period was composed of plants which contribute little, if at all, to the support of animal life. The ferns which now represent them are untouched by grazing animals, seldom eaten even by the insects that infest herbaria; our club-mosses are deleterious, and the horse-tails, though harmless, contain so much stone that they are rarely cropped by cattle.

The singularly profuse vegetation of the Coal Measures was, with all its wild luxuriance, of a resembling cast. So far as appears, neither flock nor herd could have lived on its greenest and richest plains; nor does even the flora of the Oolite seem to have been in the least suited for the purposes of the shepherd or herdsman. Not until we enter on the Tertiary periods do we find floras amid which man might have profitably laboured as a dresser of gardens a tiller of fields, or a keeper of flocks and herds. Nay, there are whole orders and families of plants of the very first importance to man which do not appear until late in even the Tertiary ages. Some degree of doubt must always attach to merely negative evidence, but Agassiz, a geologist whose statements must be received with respect by every student of the science, finds reason to conclude that the order of the Rosaceæ,—an order more important to the gardener than almost any other, and to which the apple, the pear, the quince, the cherry, the plum the peach,the apricot,the victorine, the almond, the raspberry, the strawberry, and the various bramble berries belong, together with all the roses and the potentillas,—was introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man. And the true grasses—a still more important order, which, as the corn-bearing plants of the agriculturist, feed at the present time at least two thirds of the human species, and in their humbler varieties form the staple food of the grazing animals—scarce appear in the fossil state at all. They are peculiarly plants of the human period.

There is some pleasant comment in this lecture on the first appearance, with the flowers by which man's eye was to be refreshed, of bees, in the amber of the Eocene.

The second lecture describes briefly the Paleontology of Animals. Here we pass over a not very philosophical discovery of a god of punishment in the creation of animals of prey; —it is hard to imagine in what way means of life and happiness could have been economised so perfectly and so mercifully as in making the death of one creature, sudden and free from torment of disease, the means of life and strength to others ;—we pass, over this tribute to the rigorous old school of theology, and over a kindred homily on the degraded state of serpents, to quote a suggestive passage.

"It is a circumstance quite extraordinary and unexpected," says Agassiz, in his profoundly interesting work on Lake Superior, "that the fossil plants of the Tertiary beds of Oeningen resemble more closely the trees and shrubs which grow at present in the eastern parts of North America, than those of any other parts of the world ; thus allowing us to express correctly the difference between the opposite coasts of Europe and America, by saying that the present eastern American flora, and, I may add, the fauna also, have a more ancient character than those of Europe. The plants, especially the trees and shrubs, growing in our days in the United States,are, as it were, old-fashioned ; and the characteristic genera Lagomys, Cholydru, and the large Salamanders with permanent gills, that remind us of the fossils of Oeningen, are at least equally so ;—they bear the marks of former ages." How strange a fact ! Not only are we accustomed to speak of the eastern continents as the Old World, in contradistinction to the great continent of the west, but to speak also of the world before the Flood as the Old World, in contradistinction to that post-diluvian world which succeeded it. And yet equally, if we receive the term in either of its acceptations, is America an older world still,—an older world than that of the eastern continents,—an older world, in the fashion and type of its productions, than the world before the Flood. And when the immigrant settler takes axe amid the deep back woods, to lay open for the first time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before him—the brushwood which he lops away with a sweep of his tool,—the unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot,—the lazy fish-like reptile that scarce stirs out of his path as he descends to the neighbouring creek to drink.—the fierce aligator-like tortoise, with the large limbs and small carpace, that he sees watching among the reeds far fish and frogs, just as he reaches the water —and the little hare-like rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way,—all attest by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, how old a country the seemingly new one really is,—a country vastly older, in type at least, than that of the antediluvians and the patriarchs, and only to be compared with that which flourished on the eastern side of the Atlantic long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whose perished productions we find looked up in the loess of the Rhine or amid the lignites of Nassau. America is emphatically the Old World.

The third lecture sets out with the assertion made fifty years since by Dr. Chalmers that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe." Reason is shown for the belief that the days of the Mosaic account of the creation were great periods, and in the next lecture—the fourth—the opinion is adopted and very ably advocated, that the cosmogony of Moses was described from visions, each showing a typical part of a great period; and the seer being, with regard to each, an observer having his place on the earth itself for point of view. There is a picturesque and characteristic passage in which Mr. Miller has reconstructed visions as they might have been true both to science and to the letter of the text of Scripture. By the adoption of this theory since Moses described only what he saw, and was told nothing, every difficulty on the score of scientific error is got rid of. In a subsequent lecture Mr Miller wisely says that God revealed nothing to man which he was able to discover for himself, and points out the great difference between false systems of theology, like the Hindoo, which commit believers in them to distinct theories of nature, and the true system which, as in the Bible, never puts forward any cosmical theory at all, but speaks of natural things as they are seen naturally, and reveals to us only spiritual truth.     

In the fifth and sixth lectures Mr. Miller specially discusses Geology in its bearings on the two Theologies, the natural and the revealed. All the contents of these chapters are ingenious, and some are truly wise. The vindication of the dignity of man as declared equally by geology and theology, against Pope's theory of a God who sees with equal eye a hero perish or a sparrow fall, is ably written. " Ye are of more value than many sparrows," says Religion. Science says, in the words of Professor Owen, "Man is the end towards which all the animal creation has tended, from the first appearance of the first Palaeozoic fishes." This is Mr. Miller's doctrine. We need hardly say that, ably and truly as this whole subject is reasoned, the author becomes inevitably less philosophical when the doctrines of original sin and redemption come to be read dimly in the stones, and in the condition of existing tribes of men. In the second of these chapters there is a passage much too long for citation, in which the author elaborates the substance of what, if sung by a great bard, might be one of the poems of the world. The subject of it is Satan watching the geological formation of the world—the course of the Divine worker.

The next two chapters are uncompromising ones on the Noachian Deluge. It is not denied that all the race of men may have been swallowed up, except those in the ark, but it it argued that they must have been assembled on a very limited part of the earth's surface, probably the depressed country round the Caspian. It is denied that all the animals of earth were destroyed except those in the ark, or that the language of Scripture makes it necessary to believe in this instance what science has disproved.

The point is one respecting which, as certainly as respecting the creation of the world itself, or of the world's inhabitants, there could have existed no human witness-bearing: contemporary man, left to the unassisted evidence of his senses, must of necessity have been ignorant of the extent of the Deluge. True, what man could never have known of himself, God could have told him, and in many cases has told him ; but then, God's revelations have in most instances been made to effect exclusively moral purposes ; and we know that those who have perilously held that, along with the moral facts, definite physical facts, geographic, geologic, or astronomical, had also been imparted, have almost invariably found themselves involved in monstrous error.

As to the passage of animals to and from the ark, Mr. Miller says—

A continuous tract of land would have stretched,— when all the oceans were continents, and all the continents oceans,—between the South American and the Asiatic coasts. And it is just possible that, during the hundred and twenty years in which the ark was in building, a pair of sloths might have crept by inches across this continuous tract, from where the skeletons of the great megatheria are buried, to where the great vessel stood. But after the flood had subsided, and the change in sea and land had taken place, there would remain for them no longer a roadway ; and so, though their journey outwards might, in all save the impulse which led to it, have been altogether a natural one, their voyage homewards could not be other than miraculous. Nor would the exertion of miracle have had to be restricted to the transport of the remoter travellers. How, we may well ask, had the flood been universal, could even such islands as Great Britain and Ireland have ever been replenished with many of their original inhabitants? Even supposing it possible that animals such as the red deer and the native ox might have swam across the Straits of Dover or the Irish Channel, to graze anew over deposits in which the bones and horns of their remote ancestors had been entombed long ages before, the feat would have been surely far beyond the power of such feeble natives of the soil as the mole, the hedge-hog, the shrew, the dormouse, and field-vole.

The next lecture is that upon the Discoverable and the Revealed, to which we have already referred, and the next to that is an exposure of the ignorance and folly displayed in scientific discussion by the "anti-geologists." The work closes with an enlarged version—in two lectures—of a paper read by the author before the British Association, when it met at Glasgow, and communicates the result of some of Mr. Hugh Miller's own valuable researches on the subject of "The Less Known Fossil Floras of Scotland."

From our brief sketch of the contents of this book it may be seen that it has interest of its own, which would have claimed for it a large share of public attention, even had there been only its contents to demand curiosity concerning it.

 Empire 4 July 1857

GEOLOGY AND REVEALED RELIGION.

A fierce controversy has been commenced in the Times, with some prospect of a continuation, on the subject of the incompatibility of recent geological speculations with the history of the Creation recorded in the inspired volume. The original propounder of the discussion is a writer who signs himself "Anti-Megatherium" and the chief objects of his invective are Drs. Buckland and Sedgwick. In the purpose of these invectives we confess we have very considerable sympathy ; the object of the writer being, as we suppose, to vindicate the sacred narrative against the attacks of a fallacious science, but we are sadly afraid that sometimes a misplaced zeal may do the work of deliberate hostility.
 There is a saying of the Count de Maistre on this subject which deserves to be quoted. It occurs in the fourth Conversation of the "Soirees de St. Petersbourg," and is to the following purpose:— "Against the narrative of Moses appeals have been made to History, Chronology, Astronomy, and Geology, &c. These observations have disappeared before the further researches of Science; but those men were greatly wise who despised them before and without inquiry; or who inquired only to find an answer, without ever doubting that there was an answer. Whenever a proposition is proved by the kind of evidence which is suited to it, any objection of whatever kind, even if it appear unanswerable, should not be allowed a hearing. God will some day give us grace to discover the solution of the apparent contradiction."
 This is surely a very proper answer to those "timid Christians," as Dr. Wiseman calls them, who are always jealously suspicious of the discoveries of science and the cultivation of general learning; and who, perhaps, nourish, unconsciously to themselves, a secret but not very honourable fear that Holy Writ may some day be caught tripping by these remorseless and unpalateable inquiries into the physical history of the world.
 The present, undoubtedly, is not the moment to underrate the evil tendencies and intentions of that school of geologists—which is not yet extinct—who deliberately strive to pervert geological science into an engine of assault against Christianity. There are still plenty of " men of science" who nourish the same views, and who are possessed by a passion for overthrowing the Cosmogony of Moses by the aid of Ichthyosauri and fossil shells. These perverters of science are to be met with in every assembly of sprouting naturalists, and their shallow and flimsy sophistry is but too apt to gain the assent of young, half-informed, and thoughtless persons, who are but very moderately acquainted with the boundaries of natural and supernatural knowledge. Such evildoers we should be anxious to visit with the utmost severity of censure. But, at same time, we think that those inquirers who in a modest, reverent, and undogmatic spirit pursue their researches into the phenomena of nature, (to the best of their ability) accumulating facts, and honestly drawing inferences from them; animated by no spirit of hostility to revelation; and endeavouring as best they may to reconcile their discoveries with the text of Holy Writ, ought to be met with by a very different treatment. If their interpretations of the Bible are—as will happen to men who have not made theology their study — occasionally unsound, let the error be pointed out and demonstrated. But we protest against a violent and indiscriminate assault against a particular class of researches, because some of the conclusions appear at variance with a narrow construction of the text of Scripture—a construction upon which the opinions of the soundest Divines are perhaps by no means uniformly agreed.
 There is, to be sure, for Catholics a certain additional peril when the sacred text is handled by Protestant inquirers, who, with the best intentions towards Christianity in general, are not bound by those Canons of theological criticism, which the Church recognises and has adopted; and hence, as has been abundantly proved, the too frequent Anti-Catholic tendency of the works of these modern English men of science. Hence, too, the absolute necessity of guarding the education of youth from the defilement of these anti-Catholic speculations. But this is a very different thing from a blind, unreasoning hostility to the conclusions of science, because at the first blush they seem to run counter to the sacred text, when the contradiction is any thing but necessary or unavoidable, and when the writers who try to establish the conclusions complained of, are perhaps, animated by a wish the very reverse of that which is attributed to them.
 When Dr. Chalmer's expresses a doubt whether the creation was any thing more than a "transformation of previously existing materials," we heartily agree with " Anti-Megatherium" in denouncing a speculation which is at once needless for any scientific purpose, and is at direct variance with any possible meaning of passages of Scripture, where the world is said to have been made by God out of nothing. (2 Mach. c. vii.) But what shall we say to the following tirade, taken from the same letter ?
 " Dr. Buckland's supposed discoveries, and those, I presume of his brother mineralogists, and geologists, lead, as I have said above, to the monstrous conclusion, which they utter without blush or shame, that this world must have been preceded by another, in which man did not exist; but, in his place, certain irrational animal, for whose inhabitancy exclusively, not only was the world formed, but over which these brute animals presided. And what, Sir, do your readers think were the brutes for whom the omniscient Being created the last world before this, in order, I suppose, that they might admire His works, adore His goodness, and sing His praises ? Crocodiles and lizards! Nay, start not, gentlemen, who have never read the marvellous works of Professors Buckland and Sedgwick,—start not at the words ; the last world, according to them, was made out of the old materials of a world before it; and was much longer in existence than the present world, being the exclusive abode—nay, the fee-simple and hereditary possession of lizards and crocodiles! 'During these ages of reptiles,' says Professor Buckland (they are his italics), ' neither the carnivorous nor lacustrine mammalia of the tertiary periods had begun to appear.' Sir, I will venture to assert that there is not in all the books of any kind now extant upon earth such disgusting nonsense to be found as in the following passage, gravely composed by Dr. Buckland, and, indeed, irresistibly resulting from his preceding positions:—
" ' When we see so large and important a range as has been assigned to reptiles among the former population of our planet, we cannot but regard with feelings of new and unusual interest the comparatively diminutive existing orders of that most ancient family of quadrupeds,with the very name of which we usually associate a sentiment of disgust. We shall view them with less contempt when we learn from the records of geological history that there was a time when reptiles not only constituted the chief tenants and most powerful possessors of the earth, but extended their dominion also over the waters of the sea, and that the annals of their history may be traced back through thousands of years antecedent to that latest point in the progressive stages of animal creation when the first parents of the human race were called into existence.'—Vol. 1, p 167.
 " ' These extinct animals and vegetables (oh for a salad out of the latter during this weather !) could, therefore, (Dr. Buckland states elsewhere), have formed no part of the creation with which we are immediately connected.' "—Page 17
 Now, we have no pretension to write confidently on Geology, or on the interpretation of the Book of Genesis as connected with that science. But so far as we can understand the quotation from Dr. Buckland's work, we confess that we can see nothing in it either to disgust us or to alarm our faith. Indeed we think there is nothing in this passage which differs in any material point from the statements of Dr. Wiseman in his admirable "Lectures on the Connection between Science and Revealed Religion ;" nor does this great Catholic writer conceive that there is any real variance between " the startling discoveries of modern science" and the Mosaic account of the creation. On the contrary, he wisely takes occasion from the perfect agreement between these very discoveries and the sacred text to adduce a powerful argument in favour of that revelation which the most unsuspected improvements of physical science have failed to convict of the smallest (even apparent) inaccuracy. We shall quote a passage or two from these lectures, and we hope that our doing so may lead some of our readers to whom they have previously been unknown, to commence a speedy acquaintance with them.
 Dr. Wiseman first states some reasons for believing, that there may have been an interval between the first act of Creation, and the subsequent ordering of things as they now exist.
   " In the first place, the modern geologist must, and gladly will, acknowledge the accuracy of the statement, that after all things were made, the earth must have been in a state of chaotic confusion; in other words, that the elements, which later were to combine in the present arrangement of the globe, must have been totally disturbed, and probably in a state of conflicting action. What the duration of this anarchy was, what peculiar features it presented, whether it was one course of unmodified disorder, or was interrupted by intervals of peace and quiet, of vegetable and animal existence, the Scripture has concealed from our knowledge; while it has said nothing to discourage such investigation as may lead us to any specific hypothesis regarding it. Nay, it would seem as though that indefinite period had been purposely mentioned, to leave scope for the meditation and the imagination of man. The words of the text do not merely express a momentary pause between the first fiat of creation, and the production of light; for the participial form of the verb, whereby the spirit of God, the creative energy, is represented as brooding over the abyss, and communicating to it the productive virtue, naturally expresses a continuous, not a passing, action. The very order observed in the six days' creation, which has reference to the present disposition of things, seems to show that divine power loved to manifest itself by gradual developements, ascending as it were, by a measured scale from the inanimate to the organised, from the insensible to the instinctive, from the irrational to man. And what repugnance is there in the supposition, that, from the first creation of the rude embryo of this beautiful world, to the dressing out thereof with its comeliness and furniture, pro portioned to the wants and habits of man, it may have also chosen to keep a similar ratio and scale, through which life should have progressively advanced to perfection, both in its outward power, and in its outward instruments. If the appearances discovered by geology shall manifest the existence of any such plan, who will venture to say that it agrees not, by strictest analogy, with the ways of God, in the physical and moral rule of this world ? Or who will assert that it clashes with His sacred word, seeing that in this indefinite period, wherein this work of gradual developement is placed, we are left entirely in the dark ? Unless, indeed, with one now enjoying high ecclesiastical preferment, we suppose allusion made to such primeval revolutions, that is destructions and reproductions in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes; or with others we take the passages wherein worlds are said to have been created in their most literal sense."—(p. 102, 3 ; last edition.)
 Then after describing the "lizards and crocodiles," the extinct species, that excite so much the disgust of " Anti-Megatherium," the lecturer proceeds to adopt and enforce, in very beautiful language notions, very much resembling the " disgusting nonsense" which has been quoted from Dr. Buckland.
 " These examples, out of many may be sufficient to show you, that the species of animals found imbedded in limestone, or other rocks, have no corresponding types in the present world; and that, if we consider them in contrast with the existing genera; which are found in more superficial beds, we must conclude that they were not destroyed by the same revolution, as swept the latter from the face of the earth, to be renewed from the specimens preserved by God's command.
 "Some naturalists have, in spite of the valuable use made, by our geologists, of fossil remains, even in the comparison of mineralogical strata, persisted in excluding them from geology, as foreign to the science. But it is impossible to shut our eyes to the new light which these discoveries have shed upon its study, and, consequently, to neglect considering the relation in which the science thus enlarged, stands to the scriptural account. So far, I think that, however negative our conclusion may appear, it is highly important; for the first step in the connexion of any science with revelation, after it has passed through the tumultuary period of crude, conflicting theory, is, that it gives no result adverse to revelation. And this is, in fact, a positive confirmation. For, as I will more fully demonstrate in my concluding lecture, the beautiful manner in which the scriptural narrative, subjected to the examination of the most different pursuits, defies their power therein to discover any error, forms, in the aggregate of various examples, a strong positive truth of its unassailable veracity. Thus here, had the Scripture allowed no interval between creation and organisation, but declared that they were simultaneous, or closely consecutive, acts, we should, perhaps, have stood perplexed in the reconciliation between its assertions and modern discoveries. But when, in stead of this, it leaves an undecided interval between the two, nay more, informs us that there was a state of confusion and conflict, of waste and darkness, and a want of a proper basin for the sea, which thus would cover first one part of the earth, and then another; we may truly say, that the geologist reads in those few lines the history of the earth such as his monuments have recorded it, a series of disruptions, elevations, and dislocations; sudden inroads of the unchained element, entombing successive generations of ampbidious animals; calm but unexpected subsidence of the waters, embalming in their various beds their myriads of aquatic inhabitants; alternations of sea and land and fresh-water lakes; an atmosphere obscured by dense carbonic vapour, which by gradual absorption in the waters, was cleared away, and produced the pervading mass of calcereous formations; till at length came the last revolution preparatory for our creation; when the earth, being now sufficiently broken for that beautiful diversity which God intended to bestow on it, or to produce those landmarks and barriers which his foreseeing councils had designed the work of ruin was suspended, save for one more great scourge; —and the earth remained in that state of sullen and gloomy prostration, from which it was recalled by the reproduction of light, and the subsequent work of six days' creation.
 " But I think we may well say, that even on this first point of our geological investigation, science has gone farther, than I have stated. For I think we are in a fair way to discover so beautiful a simplicity of action in the causes which have produced the present form of the earth, and, at the same time, such a manifest approach to the progressive method manifested in the known order of God's works, as to confirm, if such a term may be used; all that he hath manifested in his own sacred word."
 We have only to add, that in the lecture (the fifth) from which these passages are quoted will be found a sufficient refutation of the old story of the Canon Recupero, which is positively not even founded on fact, is an invention of an English traveller, Brydone, who repaid the good Canon's kindness by belying and slandering him.

Morning Chronicle 22 November 1845

THE OXFORD "ESSAYS AND REVIEWS." No. 5. (Part 3)

On the Mosaic Cosmogony. By C. W. Goodwin,-M.A.

(Continued.)   

The middle great period of the geologist— that of the secondary division—possessed, like the earlier one, its herbs and plants, but they   were of a greatly less luxuriant and conspicuous character than their predecessors, and no longer termed the prominent trait or feature of the creation to which they belonged. The period had also its corals, its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and in some one or two exceptional instances, its dwarf mammals. But the grand existences of the age-the existences in which it excelled every other creation, earlier or later were its huge creeping things—its enormous monsters of the deep, and, as shown by the impressions of their foot-prints stamped upon the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was peculiarly the age of egg-bearing animals, winged and wingless. Its wonderful whales, not however, as now, of the mammalian, but of the reptilian class, — ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetosaurs, must have tempested the deep ; its creeping lizards and crocodiles, such as the teliosaurus, megalosaurus,'" and iguanodon—creatures some of which more than rivalled the existing elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk-must have crowded the plains, or haunted by myriads the rivers of the period; and we know that the foot-prints of at least one   of its many birds are of fully twice the size of those made by the horse or camel. We are thus prepared to demonstrate, that the second period of the geologist was peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like reptiles of the sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the land, and of numerous birds, some of them of gigantic size ; and in meet accordance with the fact, we find that the second Mosaic period with which the geologist is called on to deal, was a period in which God created the fowl that flieth above the earth, with moving (or creeping) creatures, both in the waters and on land, and what our translation renders great whales, but that I find rendered in the margin great sea monsters. The tertiary period had also its prominent class of existences. Its flora seems to have been no more conspicuous than that of the present time,; its reptiles occupy a very subordinate place; but its beasts of the field were by far the most wonderfully developed, both in size and numbers, that ever appeared on earth.  Its mammoths and its mastodons, its rhinoceri and its hippopotami, its enormous dinotherium, and colossal megatherium, greatly more than equalled in bulk the hugest mammals of 'the present time, and vastly, exceeded them in number, * * * 'Grand, indeed,' says an English naturalist, 'was the fauna of the British Islands in these early days. Tigers as large again as the biggest Asiatic species lurked in the ancient thickets ; elephants of nearly twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or Ceylon formed in herds ; at least two species of rhinoceros forced their way through the primæval forest ; and the lakes and rivers were tenanted by hippopotami as bulky; and with as great tusks as those of Africa.' 'The massive cave-bear and large cave-hyena be longed, to the same formidable group, with at least two species of great oxen (Bos longifrons and Bos primigenius), with a horse of smaller size, and an elk (Megaceros Hibernicus), that stood ten feet four inches in height. Truly, this Tertiary age— this and last of the great geologic periods—was peculiarly the age of great 'beasts of the earth after their kind, and cattle after their kind.'     

Thus by dropping the invertebrata, and the early fishes and reptiles of the Palaeozoic period as inconspicuous and of little account, and bringing prominently forward the carboniferous, era which succeeded them as the most characteristic feature of the first great division, by classing the great land reptiles of the secondary period with the moving creatures of the waters (for in the Mosaic account it does not appear that any inhabitants of the land were created on the fifth day), and evading the fact that terrestrial reptiles seem to have preceded birds in their order of appearance upon earth, the geologic divisions are tolerably well assimilated to the third, fifth, and sixth Mosaic days. These things were represented, we are told, to Moses in visionary pictures, and resulted in the short and summary account which he has given.

There is something in this hypothesis very near to the obvious truth, while at the same time something very remote from that truth is meant to be inferred. If it be said the Mosaic account is simply the speculation of some early Copernicus, or Newton who devised a scheme of the earth's formation, as nearly as he might in accordance with his own observations of nature, and with such views of things as it was possible for an unassisted thinker in those days to take, we may admire the approximate correctness of the picture drawn, while we see that the writer, as might be expected, took everything from a different point of view from ourselves, and consequently represented much quite differently from the fact. But nothing of this sort is really intended. We are asked to believe that a vision of creation was presented to him by Divine power, for the purpose of enabling him to inform the world of what he had seen, which vision inevitably led him to give a description which has misled the world for centuries, and in which the truth can now only with difficulty be recognised. The Hebrew writer informs us that on the third day 'the earth brought forth grass, the herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind;' and in the 20th verse, that God on the sixth day said, 'Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in the earth which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed, to you it shall be for meat.  And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat.' Can it be disputed that the writer here conceives that grass, corn, and fruit, were created on the third day, and with a view to the future nourishment of man and beast? Yet, according to the vision hypothesis, he must have been greatly deceived; for that luxuriant vegetation which he saw on the third day, consisted not of plants destined for the food of man, but for his fuel. It was the flora of the carboniferous period which he beheld, concerning which Hugh Miller makes the following remark, p. 24:—'The existing plants whence we derive our analogies in dealing with the vegetation of this early period, contribute but little, if at all, to the support of animal life. The ferns and their allies remain untouched by the grazing animals. Our native clubmosses, though once used in medicine, are positively deleterious ; the horsetails, though harmless, so abound in silex, which wraps them round with a cuticle of stone, that they are rarely cropped by cattle; while the thickets of fern which cover our hill-sides, and seem so temptingly rich and green in their season; scarce support the existence of a single creature, and remain untouched in stem and leaf from their first appearance in spring, until they droop and wither under the frosts of early winter. Even the insects that infest the herbaria of the botanist almost never injure his ferns. Nor are our resin-producing conifers, though they nourish a few beetle, favourites with the herbivorous tribes in a much greater degree. Judging from all we yet know, the earliest terrestrial flora may have covered the dry land with its mantle of cheerful green, and served its general purposes, chemical and others, in the well-balanced economy of nature ; but the herb-eating animals would have fared but ill, even where it throve most luxuriantly ; and it seems to harmonise with the fact of its unedible character that up to the present time we know not that a single herbivorous animal lived amongst its shades.' The Mosaic writer is, however, according to the theory, misled by the mere appearance of luxuriant vegetation, to describe fruit trees and edible seed-bearing vegetables as products of the third day.

Hugh Miller's treatment of the description of the first dawn of light is not more satisfactory than that of Dr. Buckland. He supposes the prophet in his dream to have heard the command 'Let there be light' enunciated, whereupon 'straightway a grey diffused light springs up in the east, and casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads ; the faint light waxes fainter,—it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon.'

We are then asked to imagine that a second and a third day, each representing the characteristic featured of a great distinctly-marked epoch, and the latter of them marked by the appearance of a rich and luxuriant vegetation; are presented to the seer's eye ; but without sun, moon, or stars as yet entering into his dream. There appear first in his fourth vision, then for the first time we have 'a brilliant day,' and the seer, struck with the novelty, describes the heavenly bodies as being the most conspicuous objects in the picture. In reality we know that he represents them (v. 16) as having been made and set in the heavens on that day, though Hugh Miller avoids reminding us of this.

In one respect the theory of Hugh Miller agrees with that advocated by Dr. Buckland and Archdeacon Pratt. Both these theories divest the Mosaic narrative of real accordance with fact ; both assume that appearances only, not facts, are described, and that in riddles, which would never have been suspected to be such, had we not arrived at the truth from other sources. It would be difficult for controversialists to cede more completely the point in dispute, or to admit more explicitly that the Mosaic narrative does not represent correctly the history of the universe up to the time of man. At the same time, the upholders of each theory see insuperable objections in details to that of their allies, and do not pretend to any firm faith in their own. How can it be otherwise when the task proposed is to evade the plain meaning of language, and to introduce obscurity into one of the simplest stories ever told for the sake of making it accord with the complex system of the universe which modern science has unfolded? The spectacle of able, and, we doubt not, conscientious writers engaged in attempting the impossible is painful and humiliating. They evidently do not breathe freely over their work, but shuffle and stumble over their difficulties in a piteous manner ; nor are they themselves again until they return to the pure and open fields of science.

It is refreshing to return to the often-echoed remark, that it could not have been the object of a Divine revelation to instruct mankind in physical science, man having had faculties bestowed upon him to enable him to acquire this knowledge by himself. This is in fact pretty generally admitted ; but in the application of the doctrine, writers play at fast and loose with it according to circumstances. Thus an inspired writer may be permitted to allude to the phenomena of nature according to the vulgar view of such things without impeachment of his better knowledge ; but if he speaks of the same phenomena assertively, we are bound to suppose that things are as he represents them, however much our knowledge of nature may be disposed to recalcitrate. But if we find a difficulty in admitting that such misreprentations can find a place in revelation, the difficulty lies in our having previously assumed what a Divine revelation ought to be. If God made use of imperfectly informed men to lay the foundations of that higher knowledge for which the human race was destined, is it wonderful that they should have committed themselves to assertions not in accordance with facts, although they may have believed them to be true? On what grounds has the popular notion of Divine revelation been built up? Is it not plain that the plan of Providence for the education of man is a progressive one, and as imperfect men have been used as the agents for teaching mankind, is it not to be expected that their teachings should be partial and, to some extent, erroneous? Admitted, as it is, that physical science is not what the Hebrew writers, for the most part, profess to convey, at any rate, that it is not on account of the communication of such knowledge that we attach any value to their writings, why should we hesitate to recognise their fallibility on this head?

Admitting, as is historically and in fact the case, that it was the mission of the Hebrew race to lay the foundation of religion upon the earth, and that Providence used this people specially for this purpose, is it not our business and our duty to look and see how this, has really been done? not forming for ourselves theories of what a revelation ought to be, or how we, if entrusted with the task, would have made one, but inquiring how it has pleased God to do it. In all his theories of the world, man has at first deviated widely from the truth, and has only gradually come to see how far otherwise God has ordered things than the first daring speculator had supposed. It has been popularly assumed that the Bible, bearing the stamp of Divine authority, must be complete, perfect, and unimpeachable in all its parts, and a thousand difficulties and incoherent doctrines have sprung out of this theory. Men have proceeded in the matter of theology, as they did with physical science before inductive philosophy sent them to the feet of nature, and bid them learn in patience and obedience the lessons which she had to teach. Dogma and groundless assumption occupy the place of modest inquiry after truth, while at the same time the upholders of these theories claim credit for humility and submissiveness. This is exactly inverting the fact ; the humble scholar of truth is not he who, taking his stand upon the traditions of rabbins, Christian fathers, or schoolmen, insists upon bending facts to his unyielding standard, but he who is willing to accept such teaching as it has pleased Divine Providence to afford, without murmuring that it has not been furnished more copiously or clearly.

The Hebrew race, their works, and their books, are great facts in the history of man ; the influence of the mind of this people upon the rest of mankind has been immense, and peculiar, and there can be no difficulty in recognising therein the hand of a directing Providence. But we may not make ourselves wiser than God, nor attribute to Him methods of procedure which are not his. If, then, it is plain that He has not thought it needful to communicate to the writer of the Cosmogony that knowledge which modern researches have revealed, why do we not acknowledge this, except that it conflicts with a human theory which presumes to point out how God ought to have instructed man? The treatment to which the Mosaic narrative is subjected by the theological geologists is anything but respectful. The writers of this school, as we have seen, agree in representing it as a series of elaborate equivocations—a story which 'palters with us in a double sense.' But if we regard it as the speculation of some Hebrew Descartes or Newton, promulgated in all good faith as the best and most probable account that could be then given of God's universe, it resumes the dignity and value of which the writers in question have done their utmost to deprive it. It has been sometimes felt as a difficulty to taking this view of the case, that the writer asserts so solemnly and unhesitatingly that for which he must have known that he had no authority. But this arises only from our modern habits of thought, and from the modesty of assertion which the spirit of true science has taught us. Mankind has learnt caution through repeated slips in the process of tracing out the truth.

The early speculator was harassed by no such scruples, and asserted as facts what he knew in reality only as probabilities. But
we are not on that account to doubt his perfect good faith, nor need we attribute to him wilful misrepresentation, or consciousness of asserting that which he knew not to be true. He had seized one great truth, in which indeed, be anticipated the highest revelation of modern inquiry—namely, the unity of the design of the world, and its subordination to one sole Maker and Lawgiver. With regard to details, observation failed him. He knew little of the earth's surface, or of its shape and place in the universe ; the infinite varieties of organised existences, which people it, the distinct floras and faunas of its different continents, were unknown to him. But he saw that all which lay within his observation had been formed for the benefit and service of man, and the goodness of the Creator to his creatures was the thought predominant in his mind. Man's closer relation to his Maker is indicated by the representation that he was formed last of all creatures, and in the visible likeness of God. For ages, this simple view of creation satisfied the wants of man, and formed a sufficient basis of theological teaching, and if modern research now shows it to be physically untenable, our respect for the narrative which has played so important a part in the culture of our race need be in nowise diminished. No one contends that it can be used as a basis of astronomical or geological teaching, and those who profess to see in it an accordance with facts, only do this sub modo, and by processes which despoil it of its consistency and grandeur, both which may be preserved if we recognise in it, not an authentic utterance of Divine knowledge, but a human utterance, which it has pleased Providence to use in a special way for the education of mankind.

 Empire 10 June 1861,

THE OXFORD "ESSAYS AND REVIEWS" No. 5 (Part 2)

On the Mosaic Cosmogony. By C. W. Goodwin M.A.

(Continued )

The hypothesis adopted by Dr. Buckland was first promulgated at a time when the gradual and regular formation of the earth's strata was not seen or admitted so clearly as it is now. Geologists were more disposed to believe in great catastrophes and sudden breaks. Buckland's theory supposes that previous to the appearance of the present races of animals and vegetables there was a great gap in the globe's history,—that the earth was completely depopulated, as well of marine as land animals; and that the creation of all existing plants and animals was coæval with that of man. This theory is by no means supported by geological phenomena, and is, we suppose, now rejected by all geologists whose authority is valuable. Thus writes Hugh Miller in 1857—'I certainly did once believe with Chalmers and with Buckland that the six days were simply natural days of twenty-four hours each that they had comprised the entire work of the existing creation—and that the latest of the geologic ages was separated by a great chaotic gap from our own. My labours at the time as a practical geologist had been very much restricted to the palaeozoic and secondary rocks, more especially to the old red and carboniferous systems of the one division, and the oolitic system of the other ; and the long-extinct organisms which I found in them certainly did not conflict with the view of Chalmers. All I found necessary at the time to the work of reconciliation was some scheme that would permit me to assign to the earth a high antiquity, and to regard it as the scene of many succeeding creations. During the last nine years, however, I have spent a few weeks every autumn in exploring the late formations, and acquainting myself with their particular organisms. I have traced them upwards from the raised beaches and old coast lines of the human period, to the brick clays, Clyde beds, and drift and boulder deposits of the Pleistocene era ; and again from them, with the help of museums and collections, up through the mammaliferous crag of England to its red and coral crags ; and the conclusion at which I have been compelled to arrive is, that for many long ages ere man was ushered into being, not a few of his humbler contemporaries of the fields and woods enjoyed life in their present haunts, and that for thousands of years anterior to even their appearance, many of the existing molluscs lived in our seas. That day during which the present creation came into being, and in which God, when he had made 'the beast of the earth after his kind, and the cattle after their kind,' at length terminated the work by moulding a creature in His own image, to whom He gave dominion over them all, was not a brief period of a few hours' duration, but extended over, mayhap, millenniums of centuries. No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness separated the creation to which man belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus, and hyena ; for familiar animals, such as the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild cat, and the badger, lived throughout the period which connected their time with our own ; and so I have been compelled to hold that the days of creation were not natural but prophetic days, and stretched far back into the bygone eternity.

Hugh Miller will be admitted by many as a competent witness to the untenability of the theory of Chambers and Buckland on mere geological grounds. He had, indeed, a theory of his own to propose, which we shall presently consider ; but we may take his word that it was not without the compulsion of what he considered irresistible evidence that be relinquished a view which would have saved him infinite time and labour, could he have adhered to it.

But whether contemplated from a geological point of view, or whether from a philological one, that is, with reference to the value of words, the use of language, and the ordinary rules which govern writers whose object it is to make themselves understood by those to whom their works are immediately addressed, the interpretation proposed by Buckland to be given to the Mosaic description will not bear a moment's serious discussion. It is plain, from the whole tenor of the narrative, that the writer contemplated no such representation as that suggested, nor could any such idea have entered into the minds of those to whom the account was first given. Dr. Buckland endeavours to make out that we have here simply a case of leaving out facts which did not particularly concern the writer's purpose, so that he gave an account true so far as it went, though imperfect. 'We may fairly ask,' he argues, 'of those persons who consider physical science a fit subject for revelation, what point they can imagine short of a communication of Omniscience at which such a revelation might have stopped without imperfections of omission, less in degree, but similar in kind, to that which they impute to the existing narrative of Moses ? A revelation of so much only of astronomy as was known to Copernicus would have seemed imperfect after the discoveries of Newton ; and a revelation of the science of Newton would have appeared defective to La Place : a revelation of all the chemical knowledge of the eighteenth century would have been as deficient in comparison with the information of the present day, as what is now known in this science will probably appear before the termination of another age; in the whole circle of sciences there is not one to which this argument may not be extended, until we should require from revelation a full development of all the mysterious agencies that uphold the mechanism of the material world.' Buckland's question is quite inapplicable to the real difficulty, which is, not that circumstantial details are omitted—that might reasonably be expected, — but that what is told, is told so as to convey to ordinary apprehensions an impression at variance with facts. We are indeed told that certain writers of antiquity had already anticipated the hypothesis of the geologist, and two of the Christian fathers, Augustine and Theodoret, are referred to as having actually held that a wide interval elapsed between the first act of creation, mentioned in the Mosaic account, and the commencement of the six days' work. If, however, they arrived at such a conclusion, it was simply because, like the modern geologist, they had theories of their own to support, which led them to make somewhat similar hypotheses. 

'After all,' says Buckland, 'it should be recollected that the question is not respecting the correctness of the Mosaic narrative, but of our interpretation of it,' a proposition which can hardly be sufficiently reprobated. Such a doctrine, carried out unreservedly, strikes at the root of critical morality. It may, indeed, be sometimes possible to give two or three different interpretations to one and the same passage, even in a modern and familiar tongue, in which case this may arise from the unskilfulness of the writer or speaker who has failed clearly to express his thought. In a dead or foreign language the difficulty may arise from our own want of familiarity with its forms of speech, or in an ancient book we may be puzzled by allusions and modes of thought the key to which has been lost. But it is no part of the commentator's or interpreter's business to introduce obscurity or find difficulties where none exist, and it cannot be pretended that, taking it as a question of the use of words to express thoughts, there are any peculiar difficulties about understanding the first chapter of Genesis, whether in its original Hebrew or in our common translation, which represents the original with all necessary exactness. The difficulties arise for the first time, when we seek to import a meaning into the language which it certainly never could have conveyed to those to whom it was originally addressed. Unless we go the whole length of supposing the simple account of the Hebrew cosmogonist to be a series of awkward equivocations, in which he attempted to give a representation widely different from the facts, yet, without trespassing against literal truth, we can find no difficulty in interpreting his words. Although language may be, and often has been used for the purpose, not of expressing, but concealing thought, no such charge can fairly be laid against the Hebrew writer.

It should be borne in mind says Dr. Buckland, that 'the object of the account was not to state in what manner, but by whom the world was made.' Every one must see that this is an unfounded assertion, inasmuch as the greater part of the narrative consists is a minute and orderly description of the manner in which things were made. We can know nothing as to the object of the account, except from the account itself. What the writer meant to state is just that which he has stated, for all that we can know to the contrary. Or can we seriously believe that if appealed to by one of his Hebrew hearers or readers as to his intention, he would have replied, My only object in what I have written is to inform you that God made the world ; as to the manner of His doing it, of which I have given so exact an account, I have no intention that my words should be taken in their literal meaning.

We come then to this, that if we sift the Mosaic narrative of all definite meaning, and only allow it to be the expression of the most vague generalities, if we avow that it admits of no certain interpretation, of none that may not be shifted and altered as often as we see fit, and as the exigencies of geology may require, then may we reconcile it with what science teaches. This mode of dealing with the subject has been broadly advocated by a recent writer of mathematical eminence, who adopts the Bucklandian hypothesis, a passage from whose work we shall quote.

'The Mosaic account of the six days' work is thus harmonized by some. On the first day, while the earth was 'without form and void,' the result of a previous convulsion in nature, 'and darkness was upon the face of the deep,' God commanded light to shine upon the earth. This may have been effected by such a clearing of the thick and loaded atmosphere, as to allow the light of the sun to penetrate its mass with a suffused illumination, sufficient to dispel the total darkness which had prevailed, but proceeding from a source not yet apparent on the earth. On the second day a separation took place in the thick vapoury mass which lay upon the earth, dense clouds were gathered up aloft and separated by an expanse from the waters and vapours below. On the third day these lower vapours, or fogs and mists which hitherto concealed the earth, were condensed and gathered with the other waters of the earth into seas, and the dry land appeared. Then grass and herbs began to grow. On the fourth day the 'clouds and vapours so rolled into separate masses, or were so entirely absorbed into the air itself, that the sun shone forth in all its brilliancy, the visible source of light and heat to the renovated earth, while the moon and stars give light by night, and God appointed them henceforth for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years, to his creatures whom he was about to call into existence, as he afterwards set or appointed his bow in the clouds, which had appeared ages before to be a sign to Noah and his descendants. The fifth and sixth days' work need no comment.

According to this explanation, the first chapter of Genesis does not pretend (as has been generally assumed) to be a cosmogony or an account of the original creation of the material universe. The only cosmogony which it contains, in that sense at least, is confined to the sublime declaration of the first verse, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' The inspired record thus stepping over an interval of indefinite ages with which man has no direct concern, proceeds at once to narrate the events preparatory to the introduction of man on the scene ; employing phraseology strictly faithful to the appearances which would have met the eye of man, could he have been a spectator on the earth of what passed during those six days. All this has been commonly supposed to be a more detailed account of the general truth announced in the first verse, in short, a cosmogony : such was the idea of Josephus ; such probably was the idea of our translators ; for their version, without form and void, points to the primæval chaos, out of which all things were then supposed to emerge ; and these words standing in limine, have tended, perhaps more than anything else, to foster the idea of a cosmogony in the minds of general readers to this very day.

The foregoing explanation many have now adopted. It is sufficient for my purpose, if it be a possible explanation, and if it meet the difficulties of the case. That it is possible in itself, is plain from the fact above established, that the Scriptures wisely speak on natural things according to their appearances rather than their physical realities. It meets the difficulties of the case, because all the difficulties hitherto started against this chapter on scientific grounds proceeded on the principle that it is a cosmogony ; which this explanation repudiates, and thus disposes of the difficulties. It is therefore an explanation satisfactory to my own mind. I may be tempted to regret that I can gain no certain scientific information from Genesis regarding the process of the original creation ; but I resist the temptation, remembering the great object for which the Scripture was given—to tell man of his origin and fall, and to draw his mind to his Creator and Redeemer. Scripture was not designed to teach us natural philosophy, and it is vain to attempt to make a cosmogony out of its  statements. The Almighty declares himself the originator of all things, but he condescends not to describe the process or the laws by which he worked. All this he leaves for reason to decipher from the phenomena  which his world displays.

'This explanation, however, I do not wish to impose on Scripture ; and am fully prepared to surrender it, should further scientific discovery suggest another better fitted to meet all the requirements of the case.'

We venture to think that the world at large will continue to consider the account in the first chapter of Genesis to be a cosmogony. But as it is here admitted that it does not describe physical realities, but only outward appearances, that is, gives a description false in fact, and one which can teach us no scientific truth whatever, it seems to matter little what we call it. If its description of the events of the six days which it comprises be merely one of appearances and not of realities, it can teach us nothing regarding them.

Dissatisfied with the scheme of conciliation which has been discussed, other geologists have proposed to give an entirely mythical or enigmatical sense to the Mosaic narrative, and to consider the creative days described as vast periods of time. This plan was long ago suggested, but it has of late enjoyed a high degree of popularity, through the advocacy of the Scotch geologist, Hugh Miller, an extract from whose work has been already quoted. Dr. Buckland gives the following account of the first form in which this theory was propounded, and of the grounds upon which he rejected it in favour of that of Chalmers :—

'A third opinion has been suggested both by learned theologians and by geologists, and on grounds independent of one another—viz., that the days of the Mosaic creation need not be understood to imply the same length of time which is now occupied by a single revolution of the globe, but successive periods each of great extent; and it has been asserted that the order of succession of the organic remains of a former world accords with the order of creation recorded in Genesis. The assertion, though to a certain degree apparently correct, is not entirely supported by geological facts, since it appears that the most ancient marine animals occur in the same division of the lowest transition strata with the earliest remains of vegetables, so that the evidence of organic remains, as far as it goes, shows the origin of plants and animals to have been contemporaneous : if any creation of vegetables preceded that of animals, no evidence of such an event has yet been discovered by the researches of geology. Still there is, I believe, no found critical or theological objection to the interpretation of the word 'day' as meaning a long period.'

Archdeacon Pratt also summarily rejects this view as untenable:—

'There is one other class of interpreters, however, with whom I find it impossible to agree, —I mean those who take the six days to be six periods of . . .  .the principle of interpretation in a work on the Creation and the Fall, by the Rev. D. Macdonald ; also in Mr. Hugh Miller's posthumous work, the Testimony of the Rocks, and also in an admirable treatise on the Prœ-Adamite Earth in Dr. Lardner's Museum of Science. In this last it is the more surprising because the successive chapters are in fact an accumulation of evidence which points the other way, as a writer in the Christian Observer, January, 1858, has conclusively shown. The late M. D'Orbigny has demonstrated in his Prodrome de Polœonto logie, after an elaborate examination of vast multitudes of fossils, that there have been at least twenty-nine distinct periods of animal and vegetable existence—that is, twenty-nine creations separated one from another by catastrophes which have swept away the species existing at the time, with a very few solitary exceptions, never exceeding one and a-half per cent. of the whole number discovered which have either survived the catastrophe, or have been erroneously designated. But not a single species of the preceding period survived the lust of these catastrophes, and this closed the Tertiary period and ushered in the Human period. The evidence adduced by M. D'Orbigny shows that both plants and animals appeared in every one of those twenty-nine periods. The notion, therefore, that the 'days', of Genesis represent periods of creation from the beginning of things is at once refuted. The parallel is destroyed both in the number of the periods (thirty, including the Azoic, instead of six), and also in the character of the things created. No argument could be more complete ; and yet the writer of the Prœ-Adamite Earth, in the last two pages, sums up his lucid sketch of M. D'Orbigny's researches by referring the account in the first chapter of Genesis to the whole creation from the beginning of all things, a selection of epochs being made, as he imagines, for the six days or periods.'

In this trenchant manner do theological geologists overthrow one another's theories. However, Hugh Miller was perfectly aware of the difficulty involved in his view of the question, and we shall endeavour to show the reader the manner in which be deals with it.

He begins by pointing out that the families of vegetables and animals were introduced upon earth as nearly as possible according to the great classes in which naturalists have arranged the modern flora and fauna. According to the arrangement of Lindley, he observes —'Commencing at the bottom of the scale we find the thallogens, or flowerless plants, which lack proper stems and leaves—a class which includes all the algæ. Next succeed the acrogens, or flowerless plants that possess both stems and leaves—such as the ferns and their allies. Next, omitting an inconspicuous class, represented by but a few parasitical plants incapable of preservation as fossils, come the endogens—monocotyledonous flowering plants, that include the palms, the liliaceæ, and several other families, all   characterised by the parallel venation of their leaves. Next, omitting another inconspicuous tribe, there follows a very important class, the gymnogens—polycotylodonous trees, represented by the coniferæ and cycadacæ. And last of all come the dicotyledonous exogens—a class to which all our fruit and what are known as our forest trees belong, with a vastly preponderating majority of the herbs and flowers that impart fertility and beauty to our gardens and meadows.' The order in which fossils of these several classes appear in the strata, Hugh Miller states to be as follows :—In the Lower Silurian we find only thallogens, in the Upper Silurian acrogens are added. The gymnogens appear rather prematurely, it might be thought, in the old red sandstone, the endogens (monocotyledonous) coming after them in the carboniferous group. Dicotyledonous exogens enter at the close of the oolitic period, and come to their greatest development in the tertiary. Again, the animal tribes have been introduced in an order closely agreeing with the geological divisions established by Cuvier. In the Silurian beds the invertebrate creatures, the radiata, articulata, and mollusca, appear, simultaneously. At the close of the period, fishes, the lowest of the vertebrata, appear : before the old red sandstone period had passed away, reptiles had come into existence ; birds, and the marsupial mammals, enter in the oolitic period ; placental mammals in the tertiary ; and man last of all.   

Now, these facts do certainly tally to some extent with the Mosaic account, which represents fish and fowl as having been produced from the waters on the fifth day, reptiles and mammals from the earth on the sixth, and man as made last of all. The agreement, however, is far from exact, as according to theological evidence, reptiles would appear to have existed ages before birds and mammals, whereas here the creation of birds is attributed to the fifth day, that of reptiles to the sixth. There remains, moreover, the insuperable difficulty of the plants and trees being represented as made on the third day—that is, more than an age before fishes and birds ; which is clearly not the case. 

Although, therefore, there is a superficial resemblance in the Mosaic account to that of the geologists, it is evident that the bare theory that a 'day' means an age or immense geological period might be made to yield some rather strange results. What becomes of the evening and morning of which each day is said to have consisted? Was each geologic age divided into two long intervals, one all darkness, the other all light ? and if so, what became of the plants and trees created in the third day or period, when the evening of the fourth day (the evenings, be it observed, precede the mornings) set in? They must have passed through half a seculum of total darkness, not even cheered by that dim light which the sun, not yet completely manifested, supplied on the morning of the third day. Such an ordeal would have completely destroyed the whole vegetable creation, and yet we find that it survived, and was appointed on the sixth day as the food of man and animals. In fact, we need only substitute the word 'period' for 'day' in the Mosaic narrative to make it very apparent that the writer at least had no such meaning, nor could he have conveyed any such meaning to those who first heard his account read.

'It has been held,' says Hugh Miller, 'by accomplished philologists, that the days of Mosaic creation may be regarded without doing violence to the Hebrew language, as successive periods of great extent; we do not believe that there is any ground for this doctrine. The word "day' is certainly used occasionally in particular phrases, in an indefinite manner, not only in Hebrew, but other language. As for instance, Gen. xxxix. II—' About this time,'  Heb.  literally  [ . .]explains itself, and not only philology but common sense disclaims the notion, that when 'day' is spoken of in terms like those in the first chapter of Genesis, and described as consisting of an evening and a morning, it can be understood to mean a seculum.

Archdeacon Pratt, treating on the same subject, says (p. 41, note). 'Were there no other ground of objection to this mode of interpretation, I think the wording of the fourth commandment' is clearly opposed to it. Ex. xx. .8. 'Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. 9. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work. 10. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it, thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. 11. For in six days the Lord made heaven, and earth, the sea all that in them is, and rested the seventh day ; wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day and hallowed it.'

'Is it not a harsh and forced interpretation to suppose that the six days in v. 9 do not mean the same as the six days in v. 11, but that in this last place they mean six periods? In reading through the eleventh verse it is extremely difficult to believe that the seventh day is a long period, and the sabbath day and ordinary day, that is, that the same word day should be used in two such totally different senses in the same short sentence and without any explanation.'

Hugh Miller saw the difficulty ; but he endeavours to escape the consequences of a rigorous application of the periodic theory by modifying it in a peculiar, and certainly ingenious manner. 'Waiving,' he says, 'the question as a philological one, and simply holding with Cuvier, Parkinson, and Silliman, that each of the six days of the Mosaic account in the first chapter were what is assuredly meant by the day referred to in the second, not natural days but lengthened periods, I find myself called on, as a geologist, to account for but three out of the six. Of the period during which light was. created, of the period during which a firmament was made to separate the waters from the waters, or of the period during which the two great lights of the earth, with the other heavenly bodies, became visible from the earth's surface—we need expect to find no record in the rocks. Let me, however, pause for a moment, to remark the peculiar character of the language in which we are first introduced in the Mosaic narrative to the heavenly bodies —sun, moon, and stars. The moon, though absolutely one of the smallest lights of our system, is described as secondary and subordinate to only its greatest light, the sun. It is the apparent, then, not the actual, which we find in the passage—what seemed to be, not what was ; and as it was merely what appeared to be greatest that was described as greatest, on what grounds are we to hold that it may not also have been what appeared at the time to be made that has been described as made ? The sun, moon, and stars, may have been created long before, though it was not until this fourth day of creation that they became visible from the earth's surface.'

The theory founded upon this hint is, that the Hebrew writer did not state facts, but merely certain appearances, and those not of things which really happened, as assumed in the explanation adopted by Archdeacon Pratt, but of certain occurrences which were presented to him in a vision, and that this vision greatly deceived him as to what he seemed to see; and thus, in effect, the real discrepancy of the narrative with facts is admitted. He had in all seven visions, to each of which he attributed the duration of a day, although, indeed, each picture presented to him the earth during seven long and distinctly marked epochs. While on the one hand this supposition admits all desirable latitude for mistakes and misrepresentations, Hugh Miller, on the other hand, endeavours to show that a substantial agreement with the truth exists, and to give sufficient reason for the mistakes, we must let him speak for himself. "The geologist, in his attempts to collate the Divine with the geologic record, has, I repeat, only three of the six periods of creation to account for—the period of plants, the period of great sea monsters and creeping things, and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is called on to question his systems and formations regarding the remains of these three great periods, and of them only. And the question once fairly stated, what, I ask, is the reply ? All geologists agree in holding that the vast geological scale naturally divides into three great parts.

There are many lesser divisions—divisions into systems, formations, deposits, beds, strata ; but the master divisions, in each of which we find a type of life so unlike that of the others, that even the unpracticed eye can detect the difference are simply three : the palæozoic, or oldest fossiliferous division ; the secondary, or, middle fossiliferous division ; and the tertiary, or latest fossiliferous division. In the first, or palæozoic division, we find corals, crustaceans, molluscs, fishes ; and in its later formations, a few reptiles. But none of these classes give its leading character to the palæozoic ; they do not constitute its prominent feature, or render it more remarkable as a scene of life than any of the divisions which followed. That which chiefly distinguished the palaeozoic from the secondary and tertiary periods was its gorgeous flora. It was emphatically the period of plants—'of herbs yielding seed after their kind.' In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora ; the youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth—a youth of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendrons. Wherever dry land, or shallow lakes, or running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its icy coast under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank, and luxuriant herbage cumbered every foot-breadth of the dank and steaming soil ; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray. . . . The geologic evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organised being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and trees 'yielding seed after their kind.'
(To be continued.)

 Empire 8 June 1861,