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tion of the organic took place where the first mountain summits pro- 

 jected out of the water, — indeed, without doubt, in India, if the 

 Himalaya be the highest mountain. The first organic forms, whether 

 plants or animals, emerged from the shallow parts of the sea.' 1 

 Maillet wrote to exactly the same effect a full century ago. ' In a 

 word,' we find him saying, in his ' Telliamed,' ' do not herbs, plants, 

 roots, grains, and all of this kind that the earth produces and nourishes, 

 come from the sea ? Is it not at least natural to think so, since we 

 are certain that all our habitable lands came originally from the sea ? 

 Besides, in small islands far from the continent, which have appeared 

 but a few ages ago at most, and where it is manifest that never any 

 man had been, we find shrubs, herbs, roots, and sometimes animals. 

 Now, you must be forced to own, either that these productions owed 

 their origin to the sea, or to a new creation, which is absurd.' 



" It is a curious fact," continues Mr. Miller, " to which, in the 

 passing, I must be permitted to call the attention of the reader, that 

 all the leading assertors of the development hypothesis have been bad 

 geologists. Maillet had for his errors and deficiencies the excellent 

 apology that he wrote more than a hundred years ago, when the 

 theory of a universal ocean, promulgated by Leibnitz nearly a cen- 

 tury earlier, was quite as good as any of the other theories of the 

 time, and when Geology, as a science, had no existence. And so we 

 do not wonder at an ignorance which was simply that of his age, 

 when we find him telling his readers that plants must have originated 

 in the sea, seeing that ' all our habitable lands came originally from 

 the sea ;' meaning, of course, by the statement, not at all what the 

 modern geologist would mean were he to employ even the same words, 

 but simply that there was a time when the universal ocean covered 

 the whole globe, and that, as the waters gradually diminished, the 

 loftier mountain summits and higher table-lauds, in appearing in their 

 new character as islands and continents, derived their flora from what, 

 in a universal ocean, could be the only possibly existing flora, — that 

 of the sea. But what shall we say of the equally profound ignorance 

 manifested by Professor Oken, a living authority, whom we find pre- 

 facing for the Ray Society, in 1847, the English translation of his 

 ' Elements of Physio-philosophy' ? ' The first creation of the organic 

 took place,' we find him saying, ' where the first mountain summits 

 projected out of the sea, — indeed, without doubt, in India, if the 

 Himalaya be the highest mountain.' Here, evidently, in this late 

 age of the world, in which Geology does exist as a science, do we 

 find the ghost of the universal ocean of Leibnitz walking once more, 



