726 



as if it had never been laid. Is there now in all Britain even a tyro 

 geologist so unacquainted with geological fact as not to know that 

 the richest flora which the globe ever saw had existed for myriads of 

 ages, and then, becoming extinct, had slept in the fossil state for 

 myriads of ages more, ere the highest summits of the Himalayan 

 range rose over the surface of the deep ? The Himalayas disturbed, 

 and bore up along with them in their upheaval, vast beds of the ooli- 

 tic system. Belemnites and ammonites have been dug out of their 

 sides along the line of perpetual snow, seventeen thousand feet over 

 the level of the sea. What in the recent period form the loftiest 

 mountains of the globe, existed as portions of a deep-sea bottom, 

 swum over by the fishes and reptiles of the great secondary period, 

 when what is now Scotland, had its dark forests of stately pine, — 

 i-epresented in the present age of the world by the lignites of Helms- 

 dale, Eathie, and Eigg, — and when the plants of a former creation 

 lay dead and buried deep beneath, in shales and fire-clay, — existing 

 as vast beds of coal, or entombed in solid rock, as the brown massy 

 trunks of Granton and Craigleith. And even ere these last existed 

 as living trees, the coniferous lignite of the Lower Old Red Sandstone 

 found at Cromarty had passed into the fossil state, and lay as a semi- 

 calcareous, semi-bituminous mass, amid perished Dipterians and ex- 

 tinct Coccostei. So much for the Geology of the German Professor. 

 And be it remarked, that the actualities in this question can be de- 

 termined only by the geologist. The mere naturalist may indicate 

 from the analogies of his science, what possibly might have taken 

 place ; but what really did take place, and the true order in which 

 the events occurred, it is the part of the geologist to determine. It 

 cannot be out of place to remark farther, that geological discovery is 

 in no degree responsible for the infidelity of the development hypo- 

 thesis ; seeing that, in the first place, the hypothesis is greatly more 

 ancient than the discoveries, and, in the second, that its more pro- 

 minent assertors are exactly the men who know least of geological 

 fact. 



" The author of the ' Vestiges' is at one, regarding the supposed 

 marine origin of terrestrial plants, with Maillet and Oken ; and he re- 

 gards the theory, we find him stating in his ' Explanations,' as the 

 true key to the well-established fact, that the vegetation of groups of 

 islands generally corresponds with that of the larger masses of land 

 in their neighbourhood. Marine plants of the same kinds crept out 

 of the sea, it would seem, upon the islands on the one hand, and upon 

 the larger masses of land on the other, and thus produced the same 



