TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS. 83 



unmoved ; while for any person who has become conversant with the mental 

 productions of its late lamented author, and acquainted with his autobiog- 

 raphy, to peruse the volume without the deepest emotion is impossible. 

 Hugh Miller was not only one of whom his country and his class were 

 justly proud, but a man whose wondrous natural endowments, as well as 

 dazzling scientific acquirements made under such peculiar difficulty, all 

 the educated and thinking portion of civilized mankind, his contemporaries, 

 regarded with well-merited admiration. Under the influence of such 

 feelings, deepened and heightened by a recollection of the awful circum- 

 stances under which the grave has so recently and so prematurely closed 

 over what was mortal of this extraordinary man, we address ourselves to 

 the task of reviewing this his last contribution to the science and literature 

 of his country. We may, at the outset of our remarks, state, that although 

 " The Testimony of the Rocks" might well demand a lengthened notice in 

 our pages, the space already assigned to other matter necessarily enjoins 

 brevity — a restriction in which we can acquiesce the more readily from the 

 conviction that not a few of our readers will, even before this review meets 

 their eye, have made themselves acquainted with the book itself ; and that 

 the great majority of those who have not already done so will ere long 

 follow their example. The largeness of demand for the volume at its first 

 appearance, and the rapid multiplication of its impressions already, fully 

 justify this anticipation. 



The design of this remarkable treatise is stated by its author briefly in 

 the opening sentence of its graceful dedication to one of his justly valued 

 friends, wherein he writes that the " volume is chiefly taken up in answering, 

 to the best of its author's knowledge and ability, the various questions which 

 the old theology of Scotland has been asking for the last few years 

 of the newest of the sciences ;" or more definitely, as follows, in the opening 

 lecture of the series : — 



" In an age in which a class of writers not without their influence in the world 

 of letters, would fain repudiate every argument derived from design, and denounce 

 all who hold with Paley and Chalmers as anthropomorphists. that labour to 

 create for themselves a god of their own type and form, it may he not altogether 

 unprofitable to contemplate the wonderful parallelism which exists between the 

 Divine and human systems of classification ; and remembering that the geologists 

 who have discovered the one had no hand in assisting the naturalists and phy to- 

 logists who framed the other, soberly to inquire whether we have not a new 

 argument in the fact for an identity in constitution and quality of the Divine and 

 human minds, not a mere fanciful identity, the result of a disposition on the 

 part of man to imagine to himself a God bearing his own likeness, but an identity 

 real and actual, and the result of that creative act by which God formed man in 

 his own image." 



From the above extract it will at once be perceived that the treatise was 



