1875.) The History of our Earth. 309 
ments going on, but in aclosed circle, where we cannot 
observe. 
Still, allowing that there was a difference,—say that a 
man in violent excitement weighed half a pound less,—it 
would not bring us much nearer these wonderful accounts 
of flying, and so they must, it is to be feared, go from us 
like the man in the ‘‘ Arabian Nights,” who sat on a carpec 
and wished, and was anywhere; or the flying horse of wood, 
who was moved by the mechanism of a peg; or the older 
Pegasus himself. St. Columba is the foundation of 
legends told by men, so rude that the simple abbott was 
to them as an angel fit for heaven, and able to go when 
he pleased. 
After viewing these ancient narrations we must come to 
this conclusion,—that there may possibly be something 
which caused the idea other than mere fancy, but whether 
that something were merely what we are accustomed to call 
light-headedness when it is unpleasant, or buoyancy when 
we feel bright, must, after all, be settled by modern enquiry. 
We are not wiser till we gain certainty, but we sometimes 
learn tendencies from indefinite narrations which it is pro- 
fitable to trace, and it is extremely interesting to think that 
even the wildest brain has some little germ round which it 
makes its romance. It is the soul seeking to enlarge its 
empire of truth, sometimes doing it by empty boasting 
instead of by conquest. The question remains, What is the 
conquest in this case, and is there any ? 
he thE HISTORY OF OUR. EARTH. 
One of the facts which first forced themselves upon the 
attention of the earlier geologists was the presence, 
in temperate and arctic regions, of the fossilised re- 
mains of animal and vegetable species, such as are now 
peculiar to tropical or sub-tropical climates. For a time 
this remarkable phenomenon was referred to the conse- 
quences of the Noachian deluge, which was assumed to have 
brought tree-ferns from tropical forests, and deposited them 
to form the coal-beds of England and of Nova Scotia. So 
soon as this crude hypothesis was found to be wholly un- 
tenable, it was felt that the climate of the earth must have 
* Climate and Time in their Geological Relations: a Theory of Secular 
Changes of the Earth’s Climate. By James Croti (of H.M. Geological 
Survey of Scotland). London: Daldy, Isbister, and Co. 
