THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. By 
strength of an ordinary arm, are fully adequate to the trans- 
mission of an arrow from one point of space to another point 
a hundred yards removed; but he would be a philosopher 
worth looking at, who would assert that they were equally 
adequate for the transmission of the same arrow from points 
removed, not by a hundred yards, but by a hundred miles. 
And such, but still more glaring, has been the error of La- 
marck. He has argued on this principle of improvement 
and adaptation — which, carry it as far as we rationally may, 
still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and the dog a dog — 
that, in the vast course of ages, inferior have risen into supe- 
rior natures, and lower into higher races; that molluscs and 
zoophytes have passed into fish and reptiles, and fish and 
reptiles into birds and quadrupeds ; that unformed, gelatinous 
bodies, with an organization scarcely traceable, have been 
metamorphosed into oaks and cedars; and that monkeys and 
apes have been transformed into human creatures, capable of 
understanding and admiring the theories of Lamarck. As- 
suredly there is no lack of faith among infidels; their 
** vaulting ” credulity o’erleaps revelation, and “ falls on the 
other side.” One of the first geological works I ever read 
was a philosophical romance, entitled Telliamed, by a M. 
Maillet, an ingenious Frenchman of the days of Louis XV. 
This Maillet was by much too great a philosopher to credit 
the scriptural account of Noah’s flood; and yet he could be- 
lieve, like Lamarck, that the whole family of birds had existed 
at one time as fishes, which, on being thrown ashore by the 
waves, had got feathers by accident ; and that men themselves 
are but the descendants of a tribe of sea-monsters, who, tiring 
of their proper element, crawled up the beach one sunny 
morning, and, taking a fancy to the land, forgot to return.* 
* Few men could describe better than Maillet. His extravagances 
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