PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. xxxix 



true wood at the base of the Old Red Sandstone, or a true placoid in 

 the limestones of Bala, very considerably beneath the base of the 

 Lower Silurian System, are untoward misplacements for tlie pur- 

 poses of the Lam'arcTcian" Oh, luckless word and bootless boast ! 

 The " true placoid " of the Bala limestones, which turns out to be 

 " a new genus of Asteroid Zoophyte" (as shown a few pages back) 

 is indeed^an untoward misplacement for Mr. Miller and those who 

 led him to believe that it was a placoid fish. Taught by this mis- 

 adventure that an Anti-Lamarckian is by no means infallible, when 

 he rushes from one isolated and hastily-observed fact to a great con- 

 clusion, we claim a right to pause before admitting this lignite, lest 

 it also should prove to be a " misplacement." The fossils of fish, 

 which Professor Sedgwick so exultingly announced from the Wen- 

 lock limestone, and which he could not doubt because he had "seen 

 them, turned out to have been found, not in the rock, but m the 

 loose debris of a quarry, where it was most likely they had been 

 dropped by some workmen who had brought them from another 

 place ! When we turn to Mr. Miller's account of the circumstances 

 under which the lignite was discovered, we certainly do not foci 

 any strong assurance against a similar mistake. ' I found it, he 

 says, " partially embedded, with many other nodules half disin- 

 terred by the sea, in an ichthyolitic deposit, a few hundred yards 

 to the east of the town of Cromarty, which occurs more than tour 

 hundred yards over the great conglomerate base of the system 1 \\ e 

 at least owe him thanks for his candour in the statement of 

 history of this fossil. . 



The next chapter, entitled " Superposition not Parental 

 is in a iocular strain, and may perhaps raise a smile, partly at the 

 author's expense, for wit is not his forte, but will scarcely m any 

 candid mind produce a conviction. He supposes a low plain near 

 the sea, containing marine remains, with those of some reptiles and 

 birds, and covered by peaty mould, containing fragments ot trees, the 

 remains of a monkey, and over that the wreck of a human form. 

 He supposes a ditch cut in this formation, presenting the fossils in 

 ascending succession, and a would-be philosopher arguing from the 

 succession, that the series of animals represented by the remains had 

 stood in a parental relation to each other. And we are further 

 informed that this is the infidel view of the matter m opposition to 

 the doctrine that "the Author of All created both land productions 

 and sea productions at the; times before appointed, and determine 



the bounds of their habitation.' ' 



Now, in the first place, there is nothing m the view of creation 

 presented in the present work which stands m contrast to the doc 

 trine that God created the living things of the world. The question 

 is about something more special-the manner how Apparently, 

 however, it is not for the author of such a work to hope, that his 

 views will be taken on his own showing. And yet Mr. Miller, at 

 starting, had been candid enough to admit that the development 

 hypothesis did not involve atheism. 



