XXxiv PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. 



determined) has been found in the Llandeillo flags and in the Lower 

 Silurian rocks of Bala." This relic was determined to be a fish 

 spine by " a very competent authority," and, according to Mr. Miller, 

 we owed the important fact to " one of the most cautious and prac- 

 tised geologists of the present age, Professor Sedgwick." At the 

 same time, it was stated that Professor Phillips had found remains 

 of a fish in the Wenlock Shale, a position lower than the Wenlock 

 Limestone. About the same level, similar relics had been discovered 

 in America. Thus a great array of instances of fish in the Lower 

 Silurians and lower portions of the Upper Silurians was made up, 

 to the assumed confusion of the advocates of the development 

 hypothesis. Mr. Miller penned an eloquent chapter on the subject, 

 speculating on the size and character of the animals, and not failing 

 to apologise for the tediousness to which he was condemned by his 

 adherence to facts, he being in this respect at a great disadvantage 

 in comparison with the ingenious theorist who has only a fancy 

 picture to make up. 



Will it ever be believed by the readers of Mr. Miller's ingenious 

 book, that not one of the " facts" on which he is so fearful of being 

 tedious, is a fact at all ? From " a very competent authority,"* we 

 learn that the seven species of fish from the Wenlock Limestone, 

 believed in by Professor Sedgwick, because he had " seen" them, 

 turn out to have been found in the debris of a quarry of that rock, 

 where it is admitted they had most probably been dropped from the 

 pocket of some workman who had obtained them in a neighbouring 

 quarry of a higher formation !f The Onchus spine from the Bala 

 Limestone had been entered by the government surveyors, as a 

 fragment of fish, after only a " cursory examination ;" it proves to 

 be " in reality, half the rostral shield of a trilobite !" " Its resem- 

 blance to an Onchus was due merely to its being broken in half and 

 obscured by stone." In like manner, the spine from the Llandeillo 

 flags, certified as such by " one of the most cautious and practised 

 geologists of the present age," has been declared to be nothing but 

 a piece of "a new genus ot Asteroid Zoophyte," something lower in 

 creation than even the Bala spine proved to be ! While these vexing 

 discoveries have been in progress, Professor Phillips has withdrawn 

 his authority from the remains in the Wenlock Shale, and the low 

 position assigned to the American specimen by Mr. Miller has not 

 been sustained. In short, the whole of this chapter, which Mr. Miller 

 feared would be tedious from its adherence to " sober fact," ought to 

 be the most amusing in his whole book, seeing that it consists only 

 of the purest fictions, the fictions of over-hasty science. 



Mr. Miller has not yet, however, exhausted his traces of vertebrate 

 life in the Lower Silurians. " The course of discovery," says he, 

 " has added greatly more to the evidence previously accumulated 

 against the Lamarckian than it has withdrawn. The track of a 



* J. W. Salter, in Journal of Geol. Soc., May, 1351. 

 t This is Mr. Salter's conjecture. 



