O PREFACE. 



when the question of Life is receiving a wider audience, 

 such a resumd may also be of utility in indicating the 

 line that separates the assumed and hypothetical from 

 the known and ascertainable ; and so prevent the un- 

 professional inquirer from ascribing to Geology what 

 it does not affirm, or from expecting from its teachings 

 what they cannot reveal. 



Designed for the general reader, and delivered in 

 part to popular audiences, the style is, perhaps, some- 

 what more rhetorical than befits the exactitudes of 

 science ; but even on this point the Author could not 

 well have done otherwise. His object was to excite 

 rather than satisfy the curiosity of his hearers to 

 impress them with the universality and uniformity of 

 natural law believing there can be no true notion 

 of Nature or of Nature's requirements while her facts 

 are viewed through the medium of the miraculous. 

 Nor let it be thought that, by recognising in every 

 instance the fixity and unerring operation of Law, we 

 place a wider distance between the Creator and his 

 works, or that any knowledge of this kind has a tend- 

 ency to self-sufficiency or irreverence. On the con- 

 trary, he who knows most of creational law, and that 

 the most intimately, stands generally the least in need 

 of the injunction " Put off thy shoes from off thy 

 feet, for the place whereon thou treadest is holy/' 



In treating such a theme as Life its apparent origin 

 and progress the writer has necessarily had occasion 



