tions, those who cavilled against the existence of earlier forms of matter, have discovered that the reasoning submitted to them was sound, the test unimpeachable, and the result satisfactory. Geology, fairly interpreted, supports natural and revealed religion, in every point. The pious alarm-ginning, and those more detailed operations, the ac ists have gained an additional intrenchment where they apprehended a breaching battery. Then arose ingenious, multiplied, and inconclusive discussions on the supposed length of the six days of creation. Whether each was a year, or a lustrum, or a decade, or a century, or simply twenty-four hours, according to our present division and estimate of time. All this afforded good scope for theological eloquence and argumentation, with, ast usual, some sacrifice of temper, but was and is quite unnecessary for geological proof or purpose. The first two verses of Genesis were all that either required. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." There is an interval of undefined duration between these two epochs, that of the first production of matter, and the time when it had become shapeless. This interval suffices for all the successive cataclysms, which alternately submersed and upheaved the various ingredients of which our planet the earth is composed, until it was finally remodelled from its last chaotic state for the reception of man, its new inhabitant, with the new race of animals, then also for the first time created, to be subject to his rule and subservient to his necessities. Moses ever say, that when God created the heavens and the earth, he did more at the time alluded to terials? Or does he ever say that there was not than transform them out of previously existing maan interval of many ages between the first act of creation described in the first verse of the book of Genesis, and said to have been performed at the becount of which commences at the second verse, and which are described to us as having been performed in so many days? Or, finally, does he ever make us understand that the genealogies of man went any farther than to fix the antiquity of the species, the globe a free subject for the speculation of phiand, of consequence, that they left the antiquity of losophers?'" On the influence of progressive proof as leading to conviction, no case more decisive could be produced than that of so clear an arguer and so thoroughly a religious man as Dr. Chalmers. In his work on the Evidences of Christianity, already referred to, he devoted a chapter to the refutation of what he then called the "skepticism of geologists. Twenty years after, in his publication on Natural Theology, he commenced his considerations respecting the origin of the world with a section headed, "The Geological Argument in behalf of a Deity." It having been found that Scripture and geology might easily be reconciled by those who were desirous of finding them in accordance, some writers who still questioned the great antiquity of the earth, although they could not dispute the evidence of successive changes, set themselves to prove that all these transformations in the crust or surface of the terrestrial globe had taken place within the six thousand and odd years which have elapsed since the creation of man; that It is needless here to recapitulate the ar- the powers of Omnipotence had been quiguments leading to this conclusion, so ably escent except during that inconsiderable segand convincingly set forth by Dr. Buckland, ment of time; that stratification and fossiliDean of Westminster, Dr. Pye Smyth, Pro-zation of every kind were produced at the fessor Sedgwick, Professor Silliman, of Yale College, Connecticut, Dr. Conybeare, Mr. Joshua Trimmer, and other eminently learned and religious authorities. For a single selection, the opinion of the late Dr. Chalmers (who examined long and decided cautiously) may be introduced, as quoted by the Dean of Westminster in his celebrated Bridgewater Treatise, entitled, "Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology:" "I have great satisfaction in finding that the view of this subject, which I have here expressed, and have long entertained, is in perfect accordance with the highly valuable opinion of Dr. Chalmers, recorded in the following passages of his Evidence of the Chistian Revelation,' Chap. VII.: Does Noachian Deluge; and that all which geology presents and claims, must be taken as tokens and relics of that mighty but recent occurrence. Among the earliest and best-known supporters of this doctrine we may enumerate De Saussure, Professor De Luc, and his editor, the Rev. H. De La Fite, the Rev. Joseph Townsend, in his "Character of Moses," and Mr. Granville Penn, in his work called "A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies." We believe the present Dean of York to be the latest defender of a theory which has been sufficiently shown but mistaken advocates wasted considerable to be quite impossible. All these zealous time and ink on works, some of which were scantily circulated, excited but little atten tion, and gained few converts to their side of the argument. These writers are men of religious conviction, thoroughly impressed with a sense of the truth of sacred history, and the possibility of reconciling that truth with the memorials which the earth itself presents. They fail only through the means they adopt, and the road on which they travel, to arrive at a safe conclusion. A reconciliation of conflicting evidence is not to be accomplished by referring all the various changes which have. taken place to the 1655 years comprised between the creation of Adam and the day when the generation of Noah went into the ark, "and the ark went upon the face of the waters." The regular super-position of strata, the enormous thickness and solidity of some of the formations, the time they must have taken in depositing, and the strength and force with which they are cemented together; the vegetable nature of coal, which is now clearly ascertained, and the 120,000 years which the Newcastle bed alone is calculated to have required for production; the inconceivable number of organic occupants which the world could not have contained altogether; so opposed in nature; so incongruous in habits; these and many other physical evidences subvert the doctrine of limitation, and demonstrate unanswerably that a preadamite world did exist for countless ages, formed of materials and elements similar to those we see, investigate, and tread upon, but differently arranged and modified. Man could never have been coeval or contemporaneous with the animal creation which preceded him, and was not made for his dominion. With all his mental and intellectual superiority, he could not physically have disputed territory with the gigantic iguanodon, the ravenous hylæosaur, the rapid ichthyosaur or plesiosaur, the enormous megalosaurus, the massive, stately mastodon, or the colossal megatherium. They were never formed or intended to be denizens of the same community, or to hold intercourse or fellowship. The age of reptiles was distinct from the age of the large mammalia, and that of man widely removed from either. Our world was not for them nor theirs for us. According to the best evidence, the deluge recorded in Scripture was a gradual overwhelming of the earth by water, for the purpose of sweeping away all living things, except those only preserved in the ark. This In the confined district of Tilgate Forest alone, Dr. Mantell discovered the remains of above eighty individuals of the Iguanodon species. was followed by a slow subsidence of the same agent; but in neither proceeding were there the violent convulsions or disruptions which geological changes require. In the words of Dr. Buckland, "Bridgewater Treatise,"— "It has been justly argued, that as the rise of the waters of the Mosaic deluge is represented to have been gradual, and of short duration, they would have produced comparatively little change on the surface of the country overflowed. The large preponderance of extinct species among the animals we find in caves, and in superficial deposits of diluvium, and the non-discovery of human bones along with them, afford other strong reasons for referring these species to a period anterior to the creation of man." This is a remarkable and valuable recantation, by a leading geologist, of a theory which he himself had labored to establish, and which, on further examination, he was compelled to abandon. In his celebrated treatise, "Reliquiæ Diluvianæ," published in 1828, he had referred all the bones of animals, and other remains discovered in Kirkdale Cavern, Yorkshire, to the period of the Mosaic inundation. Professor Sedgwick, who had entertained similar notions, also renounced them from the chair of the Geological Society in 1831. On these, and other changes of opinion, together with the resignation of some insufficiently proved hypotheses, to make room for more solid ones, the opponents of geology exulted and clapped their hands, and then threw in the teeth of its supporters the charge, that because they were not agreed among themselves, and unanimous, their science was naught. We should like to know what science or invention, in its nonage and progress towards maturity, could be found good under this postulatum? Dr. Buckland replied, with sound reasoning, "It is argued unfairly against geology, that because its followers are as yet agreed on no complete and incontrovertible theory of the earth, and because early opinions, advanced on imperfect evidence, have yielded in succession to more extensive discoveries, therefore nothing certain is known upon the whole subject, and that all geological deductions must be crude, unauthentic, and conjectural. Admitting that we have much to learn, we contend that much sound knowledge has been already acquired, and we protest against the rejection of established parts, because the whole is not yet made perfect." In the thirteen years which have elapsed since Dr. Buckland penned these lines, geology has made a giant stride in advance; from a few conjectural theories, many of them not more than half a century old, it is rising fast into a proved science, as Herschel has pronounced it, second only to astronomy in the magnitude and sublimity of the objects of which it treats, and almost equally wonderful in its scope and discoveries. Some very pious and orthodox writers question whether the Noachian deluge was universal, and produce reasonable arguments to show it was not necessary it should be so for the purpose intended. Among other corroborative evidences, the actual existence of trees in Central Africa and America, said to be older than the date assigned to that event, is brought forward to support this hypothesis; it being impossible that vegetable, any more than animal matter, could endure for ten months under water without decomposition or decay. In the words of Dr. Pye Smith, "Certainly the experiment cannot be tried; but all analogy, all physiological reasoning from the functions of vegetable life, decide in the negative, and determine that elephants, and oxen, and men might live so long under water, almost as well as dicotyledonous trees." If the gigantic Baobab (Adansonia digitata) of Senegal, and the Taxodium (Cupressus disticha) of Mexico, be as old as Mons. de Candolle and other eminent naturalists maintain them to be, it is quite certain they never could have been covered over by the deluge, and that the deluge never covered the countries where they are to be found. When the ark rested on Ararat, and the family of Noah, with their train of attendant animals, came forth from long confinement, in all probability they stepped out on a world, in outward form and attributes, but little changed from that which they had left. The olive remained standing while the waters were abating. This fact, which is beyond the solution of philosophical inquiry, imparts to the flood altogether the character of a preternatural event, (according to Sir C. Lyell, "Principles of Geology,") and in this light we suspect it must ever be considered. That the deluge, with all its accompanying incidents as related by Moses, occurred, we cannot be permitted to doubt; but on the question as to whether any traces of it now exist on the earth, we may answer with Professors Sedgwick and Buckland, "none have yet been found, and perhaps it is not intended that they ever should be found." 44 On a topic so important, and opening such an extensive arena of discussion, there has been exhibited, as was to be expected, much angry feeling; a great diversity of reasoning, with considerable shifting, skirmishing, fencing, advancing, and retreating, before the parties engaged fairly joined issue in the conflict, and came to a decision. It could have been wished there had been more personal civility, as well as greater simplicity of language, in these and other similar conflicts. Much time is commonly wasted, hard words exchanged, and learned expletives, with a new-fangled phraseology, are bandied about in unintelligible profuseness. There have not been wanting irreverent scoffers, who compare these outrageously scientific controversies to what Squire Ralpho calls "cobwebs of the brain," and charges on the good knight Sir Hudibras as the abuse of human learning, "That renders all the avenues To truth impervious and abstruse, And then they fall to th' argument." Notwithstanding the rapid progress of geological science, with the clearing up of many obscurities and impediments, we suspect some time must yet elapse before it becomes popular in the usual acceptation of the term. It is too essentially scientific for the million, and yet we scarcely know how this is to be remedied. Learning loves not willingly to dispense with its classical derivations, its Greek and Latin compounds, its sesquipedalian nominatives; while the unlettered or half-educated disciple finds it difficult either to understand or remember them. Something might be done on the road to simplification, if one general nomenclature was agreed on and established, instead of leaving every professor or discoverer to adopt his own, according to his individual views, and the locality of his researches. But this, if at all practicable, must be a work of slow progression, resulting from constant intercourse, a perfect understanding between distant parties, and very enlightened views. Even the great Exhibition has not yet brought the ends of the world into such close contact, as to induce all mankind to work together on one concentric principle of general improve See Supplementary Note I. at page 440 of Dr. Pye Smith's Scripture and Geology," on the longevity of trees, where many authorities are quoted. Į ment. It would be very desirable if some limit or restrictive power could be laid on the practice so unsparingly adopted lately, of multiplying species of fossil shells upon the most minute and sometimes almost microscopic variation. The ambition of contributors to seek the alluring immortality of a name is natural and laudable enough; but, at the same time, science is terribly encumbered by these unnecessary augmentations. This remark may be particularly applied to the families of Ammonitidæ, Spiriferæ, and Terebratulæ, which are becoming almost endless. On the slightest difference in the position or course of a siphuncle, the structure of a hinge, the circularity of a whorl, the shape of an aperture, or the number of septa and striæ in a specimen, a hard name is immediately invented, and a new species proclaimed. For instances may be named two fossils of the lias formation, or alum shale at Whitby, the Ammonites Annulatus and Angulatus of Sowerby, which are so nearly identical that the most experienced examiner can with difficulty distinguish one from the other.* Also many of the smaller terebratulæ, or atrypæ, as they are sometimes called, of the carboniferous limestone. A man is not less an individual of the Genus Bimana, Species Homo, because he happens to have a Roman nose two inches longer than the usual allowance, or one leg a little shorter than the other, or six fingers on his right hand and five on his left. He may be a variety, or an exception, or an eccentricity, if you please but he is still a man, homo simplex, and certainly not a new species. If half the so denominated new species were classified and amalgamated with the old ones, it would materially elucidate the study of fossil remains, and diminish, to his infinite comfort, the labor of the student. There has also been a very unhandsome and immoral piracy practised by some unconscientious geologists against unsuspecting or defunct brethren in the article of names, which have been appropriated without scruple or acknowledgment in many cases. Among the ill-used may be set forth prominently Mr. W. Martin, author of "Petrificata Derbiensia," who published, in 1809, a valuable work on the limestone fossils of Derbyshire, and containing (with the exception of "Ure's Rutherglen ") the earliest figured examples *Several of the oolitic ammonites appear quite the same, though all have different names assigned to them. The entire number includes nearly five hundred species. from that formation. Martin's names of the fossils he discovered have been unceremoniously and remorselessly pillaged from him by succeeding laborers, with little reference to the original parent. His book and Ure's are scarce, and are worth consulting as early pioneers. The plates to "Petrificata Derbiensia are as faithful as they are elegantly engraved. Mr. W. Smith, who has been complimented with the title of the father of English Geology, in 1815 published his Geological Map of England, the result of many years' laborious personal examination, and long journeys on foot. It has, as a matter of course, been improved and augmented by more recent discoveries; but will ever remain an invaluable memorial of his ability and untiring perseverance, an acquisition which may be added to, but can never be disregarded or set aside. D'Aubisson, in praise of this map, says, "What many celebrated mineralogists have accomplished for a small part of Germany only during half a century, has been effected by a single individual for the whole of England." But William Smith bestowed even a greater benefit on geological science in his treatise entitled "Strata identified by Organic Remains," in which he ascertained and clearly demonstrated that the order of succession among stratified rocks was never inverted, although some are occasionally absent in particular localities, and that they may be recognized and compared at the opposite ends of the earth by their characteristic fossils. This is by far the most valuable general rule which has yet been laid down, and may be invariably depended on by the geological inquirer. It is not pretended there are no exceptions; such are equally well known to exist, although the identical species are peculiar, and confined to identical formations, beginning and ending with them; yet now and then a stray individual escapes into the next series, and is perpetuated for a time; while in two instances, the Nautilus and Terebratula, they have been preserved throughout from the Cambrian group, the earliest producing organic remains, down to the newest tertiary inclusive, without a single break or omission in the chain, and both exist still among recent genera. There is more simplification, and with it more advantage to science, in this one conclusion, which is admitted by all sound geologists to be inconof reasoning not derived from practical obtrovertible, than in many ponderous volumes servation. Notwithstanding the present advanced state of geological knowledge, we must still expect mistakes, erroneous conjec- I mentioned by Kutorga, a writer seldom heard tures, and varying theories, before we can of in England, and the eminent French saestablish a practical science as perfectly vant, Lamarck, of whom it may be said, in harmonious in all its parts as mathematics homely phrase, he is better known than or astronomy. But Cuvier and comparative trusted. But, as Mr. Miller informs us, "it anatomy have rendered it impossible that was left to a living naturalist, M. Eichwald, the world should again be entertained by the to fix their true position zoologically among wild speculations of a Scheuchzer, who, in the class of fishes, and to Sir Roderic Mur1726, declared a salamander or batrachian chison to determine their position geologireptile from the quarries of Eningen to be cally as ichthyolites of the old red sanda fossil man, "Homo diluvii testis," or a stone!" These ichthyolites are, in some human witness of the Deluge; neither shall cases, gigantic, varying from twelve to eighwe again be mystified by the earlier and teen and twenty-three feet in length, and more daring imposition of a Mazurier, who, they occur in a very early fossiliferous forin 1613, having found the bones of a masto- mation. We request the attention of the don in a sand pit, near the Chateau de Chau- reader to these facts, for reasons which will mon, gave out that he excavated them from presently be set before him. The remaining a sepulchre, thirty feet in length, on which portion of Mr. Miller's volume is occupied was inscribed Teutobochus Rex; and that by an able and, we may say, conclusive rethe said bones were the gigantic skeleton of ply to the unsteady sophistical arguments of Teutobochus, King of the Cimbri, killed in the "progressive development" advocates, the great battle where he and his nation as set forth in the "Vestiges of the Natural were destroyed by Marius, 101 years before History of Creation," a book published anonthe Christian era. These occasional absurd-ymously in 1845, and of which no one seems ities are inseparable from the progress of all scientific investigation, but geology, from its complicated nature, is pre-eminently exposed to them. "Footprints of the Creator" is the title of a very well written and extremely interesting volume, by Mr. Hugh Miller, of Edinburgh, whose name has already obtained honorable note in the records of Geology. He established an enduring reputation by his work on the "Old Red Sandstone" of Scotland, first published in 1841. That important formation was then but little known, and he being among the earliest investigators who examined it in careful detail, the result of his researches proved in a high degree valuable and satisfactory. With no apparent pretence, and without any preliminary flourish of trumpets, his book at once became popular. There is pure ore in every chapter, unmixed with dross, and a simple, forcible style, in which amusement is pleasingly blended with instruction. His present treatise consists partly of a description and comparative analysis of the "Asterolepis," a fossil ganoid of large dimensions, lately discovered by him in the lower old red sandstone, or Devonian series, as it is sometimes called, at Stromness, in Orkney. Specins of this singular individual, and others appertaining to kindred classes, had long been known to exist in Russia, and had been There is a very fine specimen in the British Museum. particularly anxious to acknowledge the paternity or maternity, as the case may be. It has been whispered, amongst other surmises, that the authorship might be claimed by a fair and noble lady, but science, in such cases, does not care to individualize, and has nothing to do with what may be idle conjecture. We know not, and we heed not, who wrote the book, but we are satisfied its bent is evil, and we are very desirous to abate the mischief which might arise from its obtaining currency. The avowal, which, perhaps, was held back, in the first instance, as a sort of commercial speculation, until it was seen "how the book would take," is not likely to be volunteered now when public opinion has so generally denounced its tenets, and both arguments and facts have so thoroughly disproved its conclusions. This production ("Vestiges of Creation") has been much read and more talked of by some who did and a great many who did not perceive or comprehend its object. It was soon felt that subtle, dangerous, undermining principles were here propounded, not boldly announced, but slily insinuated, implied rather than declared, but, at the same time, subversive of true religion and utterly opposed to the doctrines of revelation. Joined to all this, may be observed a goodly mixture of pious phraseology, with respectful acknowledgments of the attributes of Divinity-a style seldom wanting in the disquisitions of freethinkers and deistical casuists. The sacred name is ever in their mouths, but to |