Bibliographical Notices. 137 



" Let the earth bring forth "...." the herb yielding seed," &c. 

 As herbs yielding seed were created on the third day, they did not 

 exist before ; therefore the plants of the primaeval ocean were acoty- 

 ledonous : 



" Let the waters bring forth the moving creature that hath life " 

 — dependent upon light and air, adds Mr. Ritchie somewhat gra- 

 tuitously. But as this did not happen till the fifth day, those ani- 

 mals which existed in the " period of non-rotation " were iiadependent 

 of light and air. 



If the astronomer, the chemist, the zoologist, the anatomist, the 

 botanist, the geologist cry out that no man in his senses could make 

 assertions so utterly at variance with all the fundamental truths of 

 their respective sciences, we only beg to refer them to Mr. Ritchie's 



book ; and, by way of commentary, to Mr. Tristram Shandy's 



chapter on Hobby-horses. 



But more surprising propositions are to come : darkness is not a 

 mere subjective matter ; — it is an entity (so that perhaps after all Peter 

 Schlemihl really did sell his shadow), and is identical with attrac- 

 tion. Light on the other hand is expansion, and when it was first 

 created was not " separated from the darkness," but existed mixed 

 up with it. There must have been a sort of general Oxford-gray tinge 

 about the universe. 



When the light was "divided from the darkness," the ether, of 

 which it is composed, made a general rush, and impinging on the 

 earth at some oblique angle, set it twirling. Then came a general 

 bouleversement ; the waters of the primaeval ocean rushed centrifugally 

 to the equatorial regions, carrying with them the great fragments of 

 rock which now exist in the boulder formation. The denser, 

 deeper, strata of the earth broke centrifugally through the upper 

 crust, and grinding and rubbing as they made "their way, generated 

 heat enough to produce all the present signs of igneous fusion. Mud 

 and sand covered in the ocean plants, and prevented their being de- 

 composed by the heat, and all the animal inhabitants of the globe 

 were entombed in the debris. So arose at once the whole thickness 

 of the different formations, and the varied surface of the earth as it 

 now is. 



At the same time the light, as principle of expansion, combined 

 with the gases in the primaeval ocean, and extricating them (how, is 

 not explained) as nitrogen and oxygen, they formed our present 

 atmosphere. 



So that we owe this air we breathe to plants, which without the 

 assistance of light evolved oxygen, and to the putrefactive decom- 

 position of animals. Surely the reader has had enough of all this (as 

 Mr. Dennis the critic, with more pith than politeness, used to call it) 

 " clotted nonsense." If he have not, we must refer him to the work 

 itself, for reviewers after all are but men, and have only a limited 

 faculty of endurance ; and if he will not take our word for their ex- 

 istence, to the same source he must go for an inexhaustible supply of 

 errors — errors in orthography, errors in grammar, errors in fact, with 

 a whole army of sophisms of all sorts and sizes. 



