86 REVIEWS. 



to our readers. Thus, for example, he writes on the hitherto much debated 

 question of death in the inferior animals before the fall of man : — 



11 It has been weakly and impiously urged — as if it were merely with the 

 geologist that men had to settle this matter — that such an economy of warfare 

 and suffering — of warring and of being warred upon — would be, in the words of 

 the infant Goethe, unworthy of an all-powerful and all-benevolent Providence, 

 and in effect a libel on his government and character. But that grave charge 

 we leave the objectors to settle with the great Creator himself. Be it theirs, 

 not ours, according to the poet, to 



' Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod, 

 Kejudge his justice, be the god of God.' 

 Be it enough for the geologist rightly to interpret the record of creation — to 

 declare the truth as he finds it — to demonstrate, from evidence no clear intellect 

 ever yet resisted, that He, the Creator, from whom even the young lions seek 

 their food, and who giveth to all the beasts, great and small, their meat in due 

 season, ever wrought as He now works in his animal kingdom — that He gave to 

 the primaeval fishes their spines and their stings, to the primaeval reptiles their 

 trenchant teeth and their strong armour of bone, to the primaeval mammals 

 their great tusks and their sharp claws — that He of old divided all his creatures, 

 as now, into animals of prey and the animals preyed upon — that from the 

 beginning of things He inseparably established among his non -responsible 

 existences the twin laws of generation and of death ; nay, further, passing from 

 the established truths of Geologic to one of the best established truths of 

 Theologic science — God's eternal justice and truth — let us assert, that in the 

 Divine government the matter of fact always determines the question of right, 

 and that whatever has been done by Him who rendereth no account to man 

 of his matters, He had in all ages, and in all places, an unchallengeable 

 right to do." 



And this, after all, is the only way to meet such a question. To doubt 

 the prevalence of death, among the lower creatures, in the pre-Adamitic 

 world, with the stereotyped records of geologic investigation laid before 

 us, would be, in our judgment, the act of perverse blindness. To assert 

 that such discovered facts are counter to the revealed history of our race 

 is most false and fatuitous theology. When, in the sacred volume, the 

 introduction of death is predicated of sin, as its consequence, it is 

 sufficiently plain, to any reasoning mind, un warped by prejudice, that both 

 this event and its results are limited to the human race. The pre-existent 

 state of consumption and death among the multitudinous occupants of sea 

 and land and air, so far from exhibiting to the imagination a reign of 

 terror, presents, when fairly viewed, merely a balanced state of momentary 

 extinction to the inferior creature, and of enjoyment to the higher and 

 more powerful. If left, then, to settle such a question, as Hugh Miller 

 leaves us, by reason, we feel that such a task may be performed without 

 any strife between the revealed and the discovered truths of Genesis and 

 geology. The distinct paths of these two great sources of our knowledge 

 are very beautifully marked out, in the Lecture on " The Discoverable and 

 the Revealed," and the conclusion arrived at is thus truly and tersely 



