718 



investigator, and as an able and graphic describer of the results of his 

 labours. 



It was no light praise for such men as Murchison and Buckland to be- 

 stow upon the literary productions of a quarry man, the one, to speak of 

 them as being " written in a style so beautiful and poetical, as to throw 

 plain geologists like himself into the shade;" and the other, to declare 

 that they made him feel ashamed " of the comparative meagerness and 

 poverty of his own descriptions in the 'Bridgewater Treatise,' which had 

 costhim hours and days of labour." Dr.Buckland further observed, that 

 if Providence were pleased to spare the useful life of Mr. Miller, " he, 

 if any one, would certainly render the science attractive and popular, 

 and do equal service to Theology and Geology ;" positions which 

 have been fully borne out by the character of Mr. Miller's subse- 

 quently published volumes — ' The Old Red Sandstone,' ' First Im- 

 pressions of England and its People,' and more especially perhaps in 

 his latest child, ' Foot-prints of the Creator.' 



Mr. Miller has from the beginning been the uncompromising op- 

 ponent of the Lamarckian theory of progression. Even in his work 

 on the ' Old Red Sandstone,' published before the appearance of the 

 ' Vestiges of Creation,' he exposes the fallacies and controverts the 

 so-called facts of the hypothesis upon which the author of that 

 volume builds his ingenious but most unstable edifice. In his latest 

 publication he lashes with no unsparing hand the errors of the ' Ves- 

 tiges,' and indicates the serious mischief to which an unchecked dis- 

 semination of those errors must inevitably lead, among a certain class 

 of readers, who, in proportion as they are unable to detect the fallacies 

 of such a work, are exposed to all the evil consequences of their pro- 

 mulgation. In doing this, however, Mr. Miller is careful to distin- 

 guish the mischief he is combating from the, perhaps unconscious, 

 author of the mischief — he fights with the book, not with the man 

 who wrote it. " I have not even felt," he says in his Preface, " as if 

 I had a man before me as an opponent ; for though my work contains 

 numerous references to the author of the ' Vestiges,' I have invariably 

 thought on these occasions, not of the anonymous writer of the vo- 

 lume, of whom I know nothing, but simply of an ingenious, well- 

 written book, unfortunate in its facts, and not always happy in its 

 reasonings." 



We have thought that our readers would by gratified be such ex- 

 tracts from the ' Foot-prints' as exhibit purely phytological objections 

 to the Vestigian hypothesis of development. We use the term Vesti- 

 cjian advisedly, as being more intelligible, or at all events more popu- 



